Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Some improvements to redirect tracking · 2009-04-28 16:06 by Wladimir Palant

Known issues

Blocked redirects cause a message in Error Console (“The async request failed because it was aborted by some user action”)
~~Redirects are not blocked for frames~~
~~Page doesn’t finish loading if redirects of scripts are blocked~~
~~Preferences: Disabled filters are sometimes marked as slow (forum topic)~~
~~Preferences: Hit column is too small by default, contents get cut off (forum topic)~~

Redirect tracking added · 2009-04-28 12:01 by Wladimir Palant

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 1.1, Prism 1.0
Added handling of redirects, the redirect address now shows up in “Blockable items” as well and can be blocked
Started refactoring of browser integration code which runs in its own context now
Changed the way “add subscription” links work, these can now only be triggered by user clicking a link
Added diagnostic page displaying all errors related to Adblock Plus: chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.html
Preferences: “slow filter” warning is now a separate list column which can be used for sorting
Preferences: “close” button moved to the right side of the filter editor, made the button use Firefox 3 look
Preferences: improved position calculations for the filter editor, no longer makes the text position change
Preferences: using browser’s real find bar now instead of faking it
Fixed: opening Preferences in current Firefox nightlies selects wrong tree row (worked around bug 489881)
Fixed: detection of background images breaks the context menu in Firefox nightlies

Known issues

Current Element Hiding Helper version won’t work
Preferences: Disabled filters are sometimes marked as slow (forum topic)
Preferences: Hit column is too small by default, contents get cut off (forum topic)

Adblock Plus 1.0.2 released · 2009-04-15 19:07 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

New translation: Serbian
Element hiding works in Firefox 3.0.9 and higher again (forum topic, broken by fix for bug 416942)
Regular expressions with $domain options are recognized correctly
Blockable items: when copying addresses or filters to clipboard platform’s linebreaks are used as separator (previously: Unix linebreaks)
Preferences: using more compact date formatting for last hit column and last download of subscription

Known issues

Some translations contain untranslated English strings

Another release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.0.2 · 2009-04-12 14:50 by Wladimir Palant

This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.0.2 that makes element hiding compatible with Firefox 3.0.9. A new branch ADBLOCK_PLUS_1_0_BRANCH has been created for this release, it doesn’t contain the refactoring work happening on the default branch.

Known issues

~~Element hiding broken in Firefox 3.0.8 and below~~

Release candidate with fixes for Firefox 3.0.9 · 2009-04-12 00:59 by Wladimir Palant

Note: Re-uploaded the development build to fix the compatibility range for Firefox.

Changes

Element hiding works in Firefox 3.0.9 and higher again (broken by fix for bug 416942)
Regular expressions with $domain options are recognized correctly
Blockable items: when copying addresses or filters to clipboard platform’s linebreaks are used as separator (previously: Unix linebreaks)
Preferences: using more compact date formatting for last hit column and last download of subscription

What is going on with EasyList · 2009-04-07 13:06 by Wladimir Palant

EasyList development has to continue, despite the sad events. Many of you already know Ares2, he is a very active (and helpful) member of both EasyList and Adblock Plus forums. He has been maintaining a German complementary subscription for EasyList and Rick was speaking highly of his work. I asked Ares2 to take over EasyList maintenance and I am glad to announce that he accepted.

The monetization dilemma · 2009-03-25 13:02 by Wladimir Palant

There has been a fair amount of discussion lately on the topic of earning money with extensions. Yesterday I read Kent James’ blog post – and only a few minutes later I noticed yet another mail titled “Commercial offer” in my inbox. Now these are typically about some crazy business model they need my help with, usually something along the lines of replacing ads with other ads and redirecting website’s income into your own pocket by doing that. Not this time. An employee of a search engine company suggested I add a checkbox to the post-install Adblock Plus page which will add their search engine to Firefox and change user’s homepage to their entry page (all that restricted to the country where they operate). And they would pay me for each change performed of course.

Adblock Plus screencast online · 2009-03-13 16:02 by Wladimir Palant

Ian Ozsvald and Richard Mitchelson from ProCasts offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable:

EasyList downloads back on easylist.adblockplus.org - most of the time · 2009-02-27 02:21 by Wladimir Palant

A few months ago I decided to move EasyList downloads to MozDev. However, my bandwidth limit increased greatly since then and I can handle the traffic myself now. So taking the load away from MozDev’s server that surely has better things to do seems to be a good idea. Also, downloads get more reliable again because they don’t depend on two servers. For now I let easylist.adblockplus.org serve 80% of the requests while remaining 20% are still being redirected to MozDev. I want to see how that goes, might change the proportions again later.

Adblock Plus 1.0.1 released · 2009-01-10 18:30 by Wladimir Palant

Major changes

New translations: Icelandic, Kazakh
Disabled filters are now displayed in list of blockable items and can be reenabled with one click
Filters can be restricted to a domain with $domain=foo.com option (documentation)
Improved start-up performance

Known issues

Some translations contain untranslated English strings