Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 1.0.2 for K-Meleon re-released · 2010-06-23 22:20 by Wladimir Palant

A memory leak was discovered in Adblock Plus 1.0.2 for K-Meleon. This issue has been fixed, the new Adblock Plus 1.0.2 for K-Meleon package no longer exhibits it. If you are using Adblock Plus on K-Meleon it is recommended that you download and install Adblock Plus again.

Impact of Adblock Plus on startup time - revisited · 2010-06-10 02:31 by Wladimir Palant

A few months ago Taras Glek blogged about extensions having a significant impact on browser’s startup time. One of the extensions he measured was Adblock Plus 1.1.3 and it didn’t make a good figure. Originally I thought that significantly optimizing Adblock Plus initialization wasn’t possible but I then found that using lazy evaluation for some values improved the performance of Adblock Plus 1.2 quite significantly. So I decided to check what things look like now.

The wrong way to deal with privacy concerns · 2010-05-26 14:30 by Wladimir Palant

Generally, I am not the guy to pick on Google. I think that they usually bring out very solid (often brilliant) solutions and do a good job on the privacy front (meaning: far from perfect but significantly better than the competition). All the more surprising was their release of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which doesn’t quite live up to the expected quality.

Changes to Adblock Plus extensibility mostly done · 2010-05-20 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with todays development build (1.3a.20100520) other extensions can extend Adblock Plus again. While details of the Adblock Plus API might change, the latest Element Hiding Helper development build (1.1a.20100520) should work well. Adblock Plus Watcher will be updated as well soon.

Other changes since Adblock Plus 1.2:

Major architectural changes to allow Adblock Plus to install without restart in Firefox 4 — this work is mostly done but currently blocked on Firefox issues (especially bug 564667).
Marked compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2
Made sure image maps can be blocked via context menu (bug 16605).
Fixed a long-standing bug: comments could be interpreted as element hiding rules (topic 5484).
Removed code checking for Adblock and Filterset.G installations, both are pretty rare by now.
Removed background images as a separate type, these are now reported with type “image” as well ($background option is equivalent to $image for reasons of backwards compatibility). Distinguishing background images and “regular” images was broken at least since Firefox 3.6.

Downloading a file regularly - how hard can it be? · 2010-05-11 11:06 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve been playing a little with numbers to find a way to get filter subscription downloads distributed equally throughout the week. You probably guessed it from the title of this post, getting the desired behavior isn’t quite easy.

Status of the Adblock Plus project, spring 2010 · 2010-05-06 22:11 by Wladimir Palant

With Adblock Plus 1.2 being released and many other things going on I felt that it would be useful to give a summary of where we are now and what are the areas that we need to focus on next. I am not sure whether it is something I would publish regularly, maybe.

Incompatible changes in current builds · 2010-05-02 11:38 by Wladimir Palant

As some already noticed, the current development builds (starting with 1.2.0+.2010050102) no longer work with extensions relying on Adblock Plus such as Element Hiding Helper or Filter Uploader. I should have announced this in advance, sorry about forgetting that. Right now is the rare occasion when Adblock Plus has to break compatibility with such extensions (last time was Adblock Plus 0.7.5.2).

Adblock Plus 1.2 released · 2010-04-30 15:42 by Wladimir Palant

Major changes

Completely reworked subscriptions user interface, better first-run experience
Many performance improvements, in particular improvements to startup time
Fixed most issues with the “Tabs on Flash and Java” feature
More information in the ABP icon tooltip
Better Fennec, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey support

New "Known issues" page · 2010-04-27 13:25 by Wladimir Palant

With the “known issues” section of release changelogs growing constantly lately I felt that moving it to a separate page would serve the cause better. This will allow us to link the the issue in question directly rather than saying “look at the end of the known issues section”, also the description can be more detailed without space restrictions. I put up a first version of this page, any comments? Can you think of other common issues that should be mentioned there?

Second Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-22 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010042202) is the second release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. The scheduled release date is April 30th.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Updated translations: 27 locales are done, two more are complete but being tested
Opening a new tab from the list of blockable items respects browser preferences, esp. with regards to opening in background (bug 22722)
Fixed some cases where opening tabs from Adblock Plus in Thunderbird/SeaMonkey would trigger the default browser unnecessarily
Improved Fennec (Firefox Mobile) integration, using the site menu in Fennec 1.1 to display Adblock Plus status
Thunderbird: moved Adblock Plus toolbar icon to the message header which is a better place for it
A bunch of minor tweaks around toolbar icon in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
Added $elemhide option for exception rules to disable element hiding on a page, unlike $document this option doesn’t affect frames embedded in a page or items matching blocking rules (forum topic)