Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Moved blockable items list to the bottom of the window · 2007-02-06 01:06 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

List of blockable items now appears at the bottom of the window instead of being placed in the sidebar, the behavior has been made consistent throughout host applications — with exception of K-Meleon that still supports only the detached state (forum thread)
Fixed: “Open in new tab” and “Flash item’s borders” context menu entries (blockable items list) don’t work in Thunderbird and Songbird
Dropped Songbird 0.1 support, requiring Songbird 0.2 or higher now

Known issues

~~Blockable items: “Open in new tab” and “Add exception rule for item” context menu items should be disabled for element hiding entries~~
~~Blockable items: “Address” line in the tooltip is redundant for element hiding entries~~

Element hiding counters done · 2007-02-05 01:20 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items
Added hit counts for element hiding rules
Added collapse and ~collapse filter options to override the global “Collapse blocked elements” option (the filter */banners/*$collapse will always collapse elements, */banners/*$~collapse will never collapse)
Replaced icons in the sidebar’s “State” column to make them better recognizable by colorblind people (opinions are welcome)

Mozilla hurting Google by recommending Adblock Plus? · 2007-02-01 15:12 by Wladimir Palant

Quite a few blogs picked up the idea that there is something strange about Mozilla recommending Adblock Plus. They quote Mozilla’s financial statement saying that Mozilla earned $50 million in 2005 from search engine cooperation (mostly Google though at least Yahoo contributed as well) which is indirectly income from advertisements.

Recognizing third-party content · 2007-01-31 16:07 by Wladimir Palant

I have done all the preparation work so that now I can finally implement the $third-party filter option allowing to restrict filters to third-party or same-party content. This would be used for filters like */banners/*$third-party — if some webmaster is crazy enough to call the directory with site logos “banners” those still won’t be blocked. This filter will only block something coming from the directory “banners” on a different server.

The Sorry State of Online Advertising · 2007-01-31 00:18 by Wladimir Palant

Advertising online is at an all-time low. Users are constantly bombarded by advertisements that seem to be getting larger and more visually obtrusive by the minute. Online advertisements seem to have little or nothing to do with the site’s content and lack any sense of respect for the user. Even though it is a well-known fact that internet users detest ads, the same horrendous model is shoved down their throats. It is as if site creators have just accepted that the advertising status quo is the only way to generate ad revenue and they expect that the users will have to “deal with it”.

Read The Sorry State of Online Advertising by P.J. Onori.

Cleaning up · 2007-01-30 14:23 by Wladimir Palant

I have been cleaning up, removing some parts that became unnecessary due to changes in the Adblock Plus core and altering other parts that can be implemented in a better way.

Changes

Removed useless “Block remote ads in local pages” option together with the corresponding extensions.adblockplus.blocklocalpages preference
Removed extensions.adblockplus.localschemes preference (generally blocking on all content pages now)
Removed “Not a remote page” message in sidebar and preferences dialog to be more consistent
No longer filling the list with default filters when patterns.ini doesn’t exist, offering subscriptions should be enough (extensions.adblockplus.patterns preference removed)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblockprefs and extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblocksync preferences (Adblock’s preferences are now only imported when patterns.ini doesn’t exist yet)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.grouporder preference (hardcoded now, no point in having this as a preference)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.linktypes preference (using a more general approach to recognize nodes that can have links)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.blocktypes preference (rules like *$stylesheet can be used to prevent a particular type from being blocked)
Removed mostly useless extensions.adblockplus.noncollapsabletypes preference
Removed exceptions for about:blank
Now ignoring effectively empty rows/cols attributes when collapsing frames in a frameset
Fixed: items with same address but different type always appear as one item in the list

Anatomy of ads · 2007-01-25 18:57 by Wladimir Palant

I would like to take a look at the different costs connected to ads. Most of the time, the only cost people consider is our attention — ads are designed to be distractive, they don’t let us concentrate on what we are doing. Jeff Atwood analyzed the space occupied by ads in comparison to content on a particular page and came to alarming results. I want to pick another page to look at the other aspects.

A World of Endless Advertisements · 2007-01-22 03:29 by Wladimir Palant

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article on the craziness of internet advertising. I’m not commenting on it yet so just read it yourself: A World of Endless Advertisements. Don’t forget to read the comments. Some of my own thoughts on this topic: Ethics of blocking ads – part 3

Happy Birthday Adblock Plus! · 2007-01-17 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Do you remember? The very first Adblock Plus 0.6 came out one year ago (at least if you don’t count mcm’s Adblock Plus which was a very different extension). Since then we had 18 releases and almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org. The support forum currently counts 249 members (mind you, registration is not mandatory) and over 1000 threads with almost 9000 posts. Altogether this site had over 1 million visits in the 7 months that it existed. That’s some numbers one doesn’t need to be ashamed of.

Fighting ad blockers - the Microsoft style · 2007-01-16 20:05 by Wladimir Palant

I received a mail from a confused user. She wasn’t able to log into her Hotmail account so she mailed Windows Live support. And the support folks over at Microsoft didn’t need any additional information to find the reason: “it appears that your Firefox browser settings are not optimized”. Now, how does one optimize the browser settings according to Microsoft?