Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Dear authors of ad blocking software · 2008-05-09 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
I know that there is lots of different ad blocking software out there, for browsers other than Firefox or even independent of any browser. Some of these programs can use the same filter subscriptions that Adblock Plus offers, and some even use EasyList and/or other Adblock Plus subscriptions by default. And I don’t see a problem with that — as long as they do it in a nice way. However, I do have a problem when bugs in those ad blocking solutions overload my server.
Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon take 2 · 2008-04-15 23:27 by Wladimir Palant
Original Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon release had a flaw that prevented the list of blockable items from working correctly. This issue has now been fixed, only the K-Meleon compatibility layer has changed without any changes to the actual Adblock Plus extension.
Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 released · 2008-04-09 21:15 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Locales added: Hebrew, Malay
- Improved Firefox 3 compatibility
- Changed default keyboard shortcuts to Ctrl+Shift+E (preferences) and Ctrl+Shift+V (blockable items)
- Removed “Check banner links” option
Another release candidate - now with all translations · 2008-04-06 14:48 by Wladimir Palant
This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4. This time all locales are included but some might contain English strings.
Changes
- Hebrew (he-IL) and Malay (ms-MY) translations added
- Fixed: Keyboard shortcut to close detached list of blockable items is not configurable
Preparing to release Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 · 2008-04-04 23:31 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Default keyboard shortcuts have been changed to avoid conflicts in Firefox 3 and Thunderbird
- Remove “Check banner links” option (forum thread)
- Content policy now returns “blocked based on server” to trigger special handling in Firefox 3
“Flash borders” in list of blockable elements will stay longer (forum thread)
Known issues
K-Meleon: Context menu entries not always shown- K-Meleon: Not working with K-Meleon 1.5 Alpha 2 due to a K-Meleon bug (bug 978)
Shortcut keys are hard · 2008-03-24 00:44 by Wladimir Palant
When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.
More Firefox 3 fixes · 2008-03-21 23:53 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Whitelisting rules now apply to element hiding rules as well (bug 14814) (won’t work properly in Firefox 3, see known issues)
- Added support for new content types previously listed as “other” (Firefox 3 only): XBL bindings, link pings, XML HTTP requests, object subrequests and DTDs (corresponding filter options are xbl, ping, xmlhttprequest, object-subrequest and dtd respectively)
- Fixed: Error messages when inserting filters in Preferences
- Fixed: Account for new XUL iframe behavior in Firefox 3 (documents load in invisible iframes as well now)
Known issues
- Element hiding hits are not always registered in Firefox 3, this always prevents whitelisting rules to apply to element hiding
Songbird: Status bar icon doesn’t react to clicks (Songbird bug 6719)
Great Java news · 2008-02-25 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.
Statistics, statistics, statistics · 2008-02-19 12:39 by Wladimir Palant
Of course, we all knew that Addons.Mozilla.Org was sitting on a huge pile of statistically usable data. But honestly, I never really believed we would ever see a significant amount of it. Do you remember that server that would pull publicly accessible extension download counts from AMOv2 every day and display the data in graphs? I missed that one a lot now that the download counts are considered private.
Releases now tagged in CVS · 2008-02-11 21:58 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, some people want Adblock Plus releases to be clearly marked in CVS. So I tagged all past releases of Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper — future releases should be tagged automatically. So, if you want to know what the source code looked like when Adblock Plus 0.7.2 was released, here it is.