Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Some Firefox 20 compatibility fixes · 2012-12-19 15:52 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.2.2a.3602 fixes a bunch of issues currently affecting users of Firefox nightly builds (Firefox 20):
- Issue reporter hangs up while collecting data
- The new per-window private browsing mode isn’t properly respected, hits are still counted
- Toolbar icon menu lists “null” access keys
This build also removes Do-Not-Track support as announced earlier. Adblock Plus will still recognize rules like *$donottrack to prevent them from causing issues but they won’t have any effect.
Second Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Chrome release candidate · 2012-11-06 12:43 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3.0.888 for Chrome development build is the new release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.3.1 release. After the previous release candidate we again improved the way placeholder hiding works. We also found and fixed two additional issues which is why the release has been delayed until tomorrow:
- “Disable inline text ads” feature causes a memory leak (forum topic, forum topic) – the underlying cause seems to be a Chrome bug but this feature is mostly useless now anyway and has been removed.
- Fixed: Wrong handling of frames in the exception rules (forum topic)
This development build also includes the current translations.
Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Chrome release candidate available · 2012-10-30 17:46 by Wladimir Palant
We changed a lot in Adblock Plus 1.3 for Chrome and some issues weren’t discovered before the release. A new release is planned for next Tuesday, with the changes now available for testing in Adblock Plus 1.3.0.871 for Chrome development build:
- Added message on the first-run page for people affected by corrupted file storage and getting this page on each browser start (forum topic)
- Fixed: Image placeholders aren’t always being hidden (forum topic)
- Fixed: Chrome’s caching causes Adblock Plus to block ads on whitelisted sites (forum topic)
- Fixed: Ads in data: and javascript: frames aren’t being blocked (forum topic)
- Fixed: First-run page opens the first two times Adblock Plus starts up after installation (forum topic)
We’ve started a new translation round because of that warning message, feel free to contribute (even if you don’t feel like translating, you could vote on the existing translation proposals).
Major platform update for Adblock Plus/Chrome · 2012-08-28 16:27 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.2.0.812 for Chrome got a huge update that brought its code in line with current Adblock Plus for Firefox state as well as prepared it for upcoming Chrome changes. More changes will be implemented now (including ones that will actually be visible), in the meantime please test this build and report back if something is broken.
Important note: Unfortunately, Chrome developers decided that extension installations from third-party websites should be complicated. Please read the Chrome installation notes on the page linked above. Yes, I feel your pain :-(
Adblock Plus 2.1 release candidate available - restartless edition · 2012-06-23 16:47 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus can finally be installed/disabled/enabled without a browser restart. This feature took much longer to develop than expected and there were a bunch of glitches when it first hit the development builds but most of these seem to be resolved now. So the current development build (Adblock Plus 2.1rc.3495) is a release candidate. Adblock Plus 2.1 is expected to be released on Wednesday (June 27th).
Important changes
- Installing, uninstalling, updating the extension no longer requires you to restart the browser. Note that you will have to restart the browser when updating from a non-restartless version of Adblock Plus.
- Adblock Plus should no longer be affected by misbehaving extensions.
- Better Thunderbird support, Adblock Plus is now usable in tabs displaying web pages as well.
- Added support for Firefox Mobile with native UI (next Firefox Mobile version currently in Beta).
- Made our toolbar/addon bar button more reliable: it will no longer disappear if the toolbar is customized when Adblock Plus is disabled and it will remember its previous position if removed.
- The development builds work reliably in Firefox 15 and above – there were several changes that affected Adblock Plus (especially bug 650353).
- A new filter type has been implemented: element hiding exceptions (forum topic). These are mostly useful for authors of complementary filter subscriptions that need to restrict an overly general filter from the main subscription. Everybody else can just edit the original filter instead.
- Filter subscriptions are automatically updated when reporting a false positive (forum topic).
- Filter subscriptions can set a fixed title for themselves using the
! Titlecomment (forum topic). This also allows us to display subscription titles in bold now. - Filter Preferences: “Enabled” checkboxes have been moved to the left, italics are no longer used for disabled filters (forum topic).
- Filter Preferences: Links in the subscription list now have the same color as the rest of the text to prevent them from being indistinguishable from the background (forum topic).
- The shortcut key for blockable items will be Ctrl-Shift-U in Firefox 15 and above. Sorry but our beloved Ctrl-Shift-V key is otherwise occupied.
- Our custom About dialog is gone, Adblock Plus is using the built-in dialog now.
Known issues
- Package size increased considerably. This is a side-effect of different packaging approach which is recommended starting with Firefox 4 to improve startup performance (no inner JAR file).
- The development builds are no longer signed and neither will be the final release. This is due to bug 765676.
- Firefox Mobile with XUL-based UI (meaning the currently stable Firefox Mobile release) is no longer supported. Unfortunately, it seems to have a bug that will cause random issues when a restartless extension is updated. From what I can tell, we cannot work around it and it is unlikely to be fixed either with this particular Firefox Mobile variant nearing its end of life. You will have to continue using Adblock Plus 2.0.3 here.
- Disabling Adblock Plus extension during a browsing session doesn’t release all memory used by it, some memory remains allocated until you reload all pages that had element hiding rules applied to them. This is unfortunately unavoidable, the effect is rather small however (around 0.5 MB in my tests but might depend on the number of open tabs).
- The “Contribute” button will appear again even if you removed it earlier in a non-restartless Adblock Plus version. Also, the blockable items height will be reset. This is unfortunately unavoidable, these choices have to be stored differently now that the extension is restartless.
- Toolbar icon position is supposed to be kept when updating from a non-restartless Adblock Plus version, there were reports however that it isn’t working. I will look into it, in the meantime just customize the toolbar again and move the icon wherever you would like to have it.
Asynchronous file operations, end of support for old browsers · 2012-04-05 16:28 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0.4b.3443 reading and saving of patterns.ini and elemhide.css files will be asynchronous (meaning that they won’t delay other operations that Firefox or Adblock Plus might need to do). This approach has a bunch of advantages:
- Firefox startup and shutdown will be faster.
- Adblock Plus Preferences will be more responsive, changing something will no longer cause the browser to hang for a split second.
- The inherently unreliable cache.js file is no longer necessary and will not be used.
There are also some drawbacks which is why it took so long to make this decision:
- First browser window might appear before Adblock Plus managed to read its filters. If that happens, the web pages from the restored session (or the homepage) might have ads. This never happened in my testing but it is possible.
- patterns.ini is no longer saved on browser shutdown, some hit count information might get lost because of that (up to 250 hits).
Known issues (should be fixed soon):
- When updating from an earlier Adblock Plus version, the first-run page might open. Your settings will not be changed.
- Writing elemhide.css might fail in some rare scenarios.
In other news, support for anything before Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8 and SeaMonkey 2.5 has been dropped. I started cleaning up our code using the new platform capabilities and will continue doing so. Also, a work-around for the subscription download issue in Firefox 14 has been implemented.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2 release candidate available · 2012-01-21 19:26 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.2rc.382 is a release candidate for Element Hiding Helper 1.2. After the previous announcement it went through some major architectural simplifications, there shouldn’t be any visible changes however. Also, many translations have been updated already so that the Page Inspector button will be localized.
Using Page Inspector in Firefox 10 and higher to hide elements · 2012-01-19 11:51 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 10 will introduce a new Page Inspector feature, you can read more about it here. This feature allows selecting elements a lot better than the current Element Hiding Helper. You can either right click an element and choose “Inspect Element” – the element will be selected in the Inspector and you will be able to click up/down in the hierarchy line at the bottom. Or you can choose “Inspect” from the Web Developer menu, this will let you select an element similarly to how you would do it with Element Hiding Helper. Once you click an element the selection is fixed, you can click the “Inspect” button to continue selecting. Starting with Firefox 11 there will also be a very impressive 3D View, something that was previously provided by the Tilt extension.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2b.372 will now add an “Hide with ABP” button to the inspector toolbar. This allows you to select an element with the Page Inspector and then click this button to open rule composer. If you use a pre-release Firefox version — please test this feature. Element Hiding Helper 1.2 should be released in a week, in time for Firefox 10 release.
In other news, all issues related to making Element Hiding Helper restartless should have been resolved by now. If you experience any issues, please comment in this post or create a forum topic.
Adblock Plus 1.2 for Chrome release candidate available · 2012-01-09 14:56 by Wladimir Palant
The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.1.4.757 for Google Chrome, the non-experimental version) is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. It got a bunch of changes over the last few days, mostly polishing:
- Options: Fixed displayed subscription download time after a filter update.
- Fixed content script functionality in Chrome 18.
- Fixed: Two “Add filter” dialogs might get opened at a time, in that case the first dialog becomes dysfunctional.
- Fixed third-party checks when not using webRequest API.
- Removed work-around for WebKit’s image loading bug (fixed in Chrome 16).
- Updated user interface translations from Adblock Plus/Firefox.
- Updated to current versions of code modules from Adblock Plus/Firefox.
- Updated to current jQuery and jQuery UI versions.
The bigger (and older) changes in this version:
- Better blocking thanks to webRequest API (only in Chrome 17 or with the experimental builds).
- Changed user interface for filter subscription management (an intermediate step towards porting our Firefox user interface).
- Improved “Add filter” dialog, safe from being manipulated by the web page and with filter editing.
- Filter data is being stored using File System API, file format identical to Firefox.
- Using the same algorithm for filter subscription updates as in Firefox (proper handling of expiration intervals, download mirrors etc).
- Proper handling of $third-party filter options, top-level domains like co.uk are now being considered.
- No longer putting all our element hiding rules into the document’s DOM.
There will be a release shortly, please report any issues you notice.
Element Hiding Helper: the restartless edition · 2012-01-04 14:00 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Element Hiding Helper 1.2a.361 the Element Hiding Helper extension installs and uninstalls without a browser restart as well. You can also enable or disable Element Hiding Helper immediately in the Add-ons Manager. However, you will still need to restart your browser when updating from an older extension version because this older version cannot shut down while the browser is running. As with the Diagnostics extension, a reasonably new application version is required (at least Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8, SeaMonkey 2.5), old versions are no longer supported.
Another important change: Element Hiding Helper will no longer warn you if Adblock Plus isn’t installed, we will instead rely on AMO to communicate this to users. One reason for removing this check is that Adblock Plus should also become restartless in future which will make checking for its presence a lot more complicated.