Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Almost all feature work for Adblock Plus 1.1 done · 2009-06-11 11:00 by Wladimir Palant

This development build is almost feature complete now, further Adblock Plus 1.1 development will focus on stability rather than features.

Changes

Clearing browsing history in Firefox now clears hit statistics in Adblock Plus as well (forum topic)
Added Adblock Plus version and source code revision to the information displayed on chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.html
Added “Re-enable Adblock Plus on this page” context menu items for whitelisted pages, removes/disables the filter responsible for whitelisting
Blockable items: Added “Disable this filter on example.com” context menu item for user-defined filters (adds the required $domain option)
Fixed: webpages can easily detect “Collapse blocked elements” option
Fixed: “Disabled on …” doesn’t work correctly with rules that already exist in filter subscriptions

Improving compatibility with various application · 2009-06-04 00:44 by Wladimir Palant

This development build was tested in Songbird, Prism and SeaMonkey’s browser component. Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Mail still need to be tested.

Changes

Dropped compatibility with old browsers and cleaned up the code, now requiring at least: Firefox 3.0.9, SeaMonkey 2.0b1, Thunderbird 3.0b3, Songbird 1.2b1, Prism 1.0b1
Moved all application-specific code to the overlay file corresponding with that application
Blockable items: Creating a filter for an item matching a disabled exception rule is possible again (forum topic)
Preferences: insert imported and pasted comments before the filter that follows them (forum topic, forum topic)
Preferences: fixed a scenario where the same filter might appear twice in the list
Fixed: “Disabled on …” doesn’t work correctly if the exception rule already exists but is disabled
Fixed: Toolbar icon doesn’t show up in SeaMonkey 2.0
Fixed: ABP fails to initialize itself in Prism
Fixed: Indentation of some menu items of the toolbar icon’s menu too large in Songbird
Fixed: Adding a filter subscription in Preferences that redirects to a different address causes download failure

Adding Weave support to an extension · 2009-06-01 14:00 by Wladimir Palant

Weave is a pretty cool extension, it lets you sync your Firefox/Fennec data (history, bookmarks etc.) across multiple computers via some server — and that while the browser is running, no need to restart it. So for example, you might have Fennec running on a Pocket PC and Firefox on your desktop, both logged into the same Weave account. You add a bookmark in Firefox. On next sync (which you can trigger manually) this change will be uploaded to the server. And next time Fennec syncs this bookmark will simply appear in your bookmarks list while the browser is running. Weave works with single bookmarks rather than taking the list as a whole meaning that this update will not affect the other bookmark changes you’ve performed in Fennec in the meantime (those will simply be uploaded to the server so that Firefox can get them on next sync). Add to this encryption, all data is being encrypted locally before being sent to the server — so while the server can tell how many bookmarks you have, it won’t be able to read the actual data. Still, if you don’t trust Mozilla’s server you can run your own without much trouble.

Weave support moved into a separate extension · 2009-05-31 19:08 by Wladimir Palant

This development build removes Weave support which has been moved into a separate extension.

Changes

~~Added experimental Weave support to synchronize Adblock Plus filters and preferences across computers/profiles.~~

Experimental Weave support · 2009-05-18 11:46 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Added experimental Weave support to synchronize Adblock Plus filters and preferences across computers/profiles. Limitations:
- Currently, only Weave 0.3.2 is supported. Weave 0.3.0 will not work, future Weave releases will most likely not work either.
- Only filters are synced, not their position however. Synchronized profiles will have the same filters but might show them in a different order.
- Currently, there is no mechanism to ensure that future Adblock Plus versions can change the data format without causing data loss
- Syncing Adblock Plus data is enabled by default, disabling is only possible by changing extensions.weave.engine.abpdata preference manually. This will be fixed in Weave 0.4, this option will be available in Weave preferences there.
Filter composer: Added warning when adding a filter to a disabled filter group (forum topic)
Blockable items: Added “document source” column (domain name to be used for the $domain filter option, forum topic)
Preferences: insert imported comments before the filter that follows them (forum topic)
Fixed: ABP icon updates its status every two seconds, hogs CPU time

An approach to fair ad blocking - Feedback summary · 2009-05-13 15:41 by Wladimir Palant

I got more than 200 comments in two days to my controversial proposal to occasionally suggest Adblock Plus users to whitelist frequently visited sites. Given that it was a lengthy text and many users came from sites that “compressed” it, the feedback was surprisingly useful (and only few people accusing me of deciding everything without asking users on a blog post that asks users for their opinions). I will try to summarize the important results:

An approach to fair ad blocking · 2009-05-11 18:04 by Wladimir Palant

As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. In the end, the Internet does need money to run and ads are still the most universal way to distribute that money. The only problem is that ads are becoming increasingly intrusive and annoying as webmasters try to maximize their profits which is the main reason people install Adblock Plus. So the idea is to give control back to the users by allowing them to block annoying ads. Since the non-intrusive ads would be blocked less often it would encourage webmasters to use such ads, balance restored.

Flexible anchors and separator placeholders · 2009-05-07 14:42 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Added explicit support for blocking fonts (@font-type CSS directive in Firefox 3.5)
Added support for flexible anchors at start of filter: ||example.com/foo/ will match http://example.com/foo/bar and http://test.example.com/foo/bar but not http://badexample.com/foo/bar or http://evilsite.com/?http://example.com/foo/bar (forum topic)
Added support for ^ character that will match a single separator character or end of address (forum topic)
Filter composer: Added flexible anchors as an option (“at the beginning of domain name”) (forum topic)
Filter composer: Added “example.com^” as fourth suggestion (forum topic)
Preferences: fixed slowdown when enabling/disabling many element hiding rules
Fixed: an error is reported to console on first run (patterns.ini not found)

Known issues

~~Blocked redirects cause a message in Error Console (“The async request failed because it was aborted by some user action”)~~
~~Redirects sometimes don’t show up in Blockable items (particularly on YouTube)~~

Extension update patterns · 2009-05-06 15:36 by Wladimir Palant

I recently released Adblock Plus 1.0.2 to fix a regression that would affect any user upgrading to Firefox 3.0.9. In the end, Adblock Plus upgrade was released only six days before Firefox 3.0.9 and the big question is of course — was that enough time? How many users ended up using the new Firefox release with an outdated Adblock Plus version?

Attention NoScript users · 2009-05-01 22:54 by Wladimir Palant

Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make its money from ads. And to make sure that somebody sees these ads it goes pretty far. For example, it opens the changelog webpage (full of ads of course) on every single update of the extension, even though the NoScript FAQ claim that it happens only on major updates (yes, if you dig into it you will find the preference to disable this behavior – but how many people do that?). And updates coming roughly each week ensure that this page is opened fairly often.