Adblock Plus and (a little) more

How many hacks does it take to make your extension install without a restart? · 2010-09-10 15:50 by Wladimir Palant

Dave Townsend did some really great work on the add-on manager recently, he managed to completely rewrite the old crappy backend code and replace it with something far more sane. Along the way a new feature was added: starting with Firefox 4 some add-ons should be able to opt-in and install/uninstall without requiring a browser restart. This feature was primarily meant for JetPack-built extensions but is generally open to all other extensions as well. I tried enabling this feature for Adblock Plus and found that there is an awful number of catches attached to it.

New way to store data · 2010-08-27 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The new development build (1.3a.20100826) has gone through some major rearchitecturing, the way it stores data changed radically. The purpose of this change is to improve performance and memory use: Adblock Plus no longer stores more data than necessary and will do only as little bookkeeping as absolutely necessary. The areas affected by this change are:

List of blockable items (will no longer show all data immediately when opened, instead it will take a few seconds to fetch the data)
Toolbar icon tooltip (now counts the actual hits so that the number might be higher than what you see in the list of blockable items)
Filter composer dialog (adding a filter will no longer re-apply filters to all of the current window, only to the element you opened the composer for)
Context menu (behavior should be unchanged except for a recent regression fixed – handling of background images should be correct again)
Tabs on Flash and Java (behavior should be unchanged)
Blocking of redirects (I hope that the behavior is unchanged here)

I already noticed a side-effect: in Firefox 3.0/3.5 touching a node that is hidden causes element hiding rules to be reapplied. Since opening the list of blockable items touches nodes you might see hit count for element hiding rules go up when you do it. This issue is no longer present in Firefox 3.6.

Important changes coming to the Adblock Plus project · 2010-08-22 18:42 by Wladimir Palant

As I indicated before, there is much work to be done in the Adblock Plus project to keep it relevant. How are we coming along? Well, very slowly. The main problem remains my availability, too many of the tasks still hang on me. I tried delegating work, quite successfully in some areas, but that’s not enough — and moving some other areas out of my hands (like website localization or bug reports handling) requires some work on my part first. We are currently getting into the “interesting” phase with the Adblock Plus project where we actually get a chance to influence something and I think that moving faster is essential now.

Adblock Plus 1.2.2 released · 2010-08-18 10:15 by Wladimir Palant

Note: The issue with transparent context menus in Firefox 4 Beta 3 hasn’t been entirely resolved, it still affects the context menu of the toolbar icon. If another 1.2.x release becomes necessary this issue will be addressed there, otherwise in Adblock Plus 1.3.

Changes

Updates to support Firefox 4 nightly builds and Firefox 4 Beta 3
Subscription dialog: Made “Add a different subscription” button less prominent
Subscription dialog: Fixed bad Chinese translation for the “Add a different subscription” button

How about making extension compatibility updates less annoying? · 2010-08-15 20:06 by Wladimir Palant

I came back from a vacation today and found around 20 mails in my inbox along the lines of “When will Adblock Plus be compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3?” There are probably a dozen more questions in the forum which I didn’t check yet. Now I know of course that Adblock Plus is compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 because lots of people (yours truly included) regularly use Adblock Plus in nightly builds. So all I had to do was to log into AMO and change the compatibility info for Adblock Plus.

How do users end up with a misconfigured certificate store? · 2010-07-27 17:18 by Wladimir Palant

I am out of ideas so maybe somebody knows more than me here. I noticed that some Adblock Plus users cannot download https://easylist.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. Data from a different filter list which switched to HTTPS recently indicates that most of these clients cannot establish an HTTPS connection — most likely the certificate is rejected. I did a very rough estimate, we are talking about something like 0.3% of all Adblock Plus users. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but turns into tens of thousands users in absolute numbers.

Adblock Plus 1.2.1 released · 2010-07-09 20:09 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Updated for changes to XPCOM registration in Firefox 4 (bug 568691)
About dialog: Adapted to add-on manager changes in Firefox 4 (bug 563262)
Preferences: more reliable formatting of dates
Fixed: Tabs on Flash and Java display badly on some webpages (forum topic)
Fixed: Comments would sometimes be interpreted as element hiding rules (forum topic)

Adblock Plus roadmap changes - Firefox Sync and Electrolysis · 2010-07-09 04:26 by Wladimir Palant

I had a chance to talk to some Firefox Sync developers at the Mozilla Summit today. The interesting results:

Brief EasyList status update · 2010-07-06 10:44 by Wladimir Palant

Just wanted to give a brief update on EasyList. People who visit either Adblock Plus forum or EasyList forum occasionally probably noticed already that Ares2 has little time to work on EasyList and Michael is usually speaking on behalf of EasyList authors. This change is now official: Michael is now the main EasyList author. Also, Khrin and MonztA are joining the team.

Yes, Adblock Plus is broken in the current Minefield · 2010-07-02 17:04 by Wladimir Palant

I expect lots of reports on this issue so I better publish an explanation before that happens. Yes, starting with Minefield build 20100702 Adblock Plus won’t work any more — neither the stable version nor the development builds. This is due to huge changes in the Gecko platform which were announced a few weeks ago.