Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Diagnostics for Adblock Plus: the restartless edition · 2012-01-02 10:51 by Wladimir Palant

Creating extensions that can be installed, uninstalled and updated without a browser restart used to be very painful but got a whole lot easier with Firefox 8. I am now making all my add-ons restartless, Diagnostics for Adblock Plus is the first try. The current development build (Diagnostics 1.2b.156) should work exactly like the previous versions but e.g. disable immediately if you click the corresponding button in the Add-ons Manager. Reasonably new browser versions are required (at least Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8, SeaMonkey 2.5), old versions are no longer supported.

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First Customizations for Adblock Plus development builds · 2011-12-22 18:51 by Wladimir Palant

Customizations for Adblock Plus is a new extension providing some advanced semi-supported customization options. The goal is to make the customizations such as the ones described in the FAQ more comfortable and easier to try. The extension installs without requiring a browser restart, clicking the Options button in the Add-ons Manager shows the available options. Right now we have:

Vertical layout for Filter Preferences (filters below subscriptions)
Some more options for Filter Preferences to save space
Toolbar icon display configuration (text and/or icon)
Removing Adblock Plus from all browser menus
Two hidden Adblock Plus options (left-click action for the toolbar icon and default selection for the Filter Composer)

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Tags: customizations development builds

Release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.0 available · 2011-12-09 13:54 by Wladimir Palant

All the necessary changes are done and the development builds starting with Adblock Plus 2.0rc.3323 are release candidates for Adblock Plus 2.0. If everything goes well it will be released on Monday.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Adblock Plus options are now displayed directly on its page in Add-ons Manager (in Firefox 7 and above, in older versions the Options button opens toolbar icon’s menu).
Changed the way the toolbar icon is being hidden, now it can always be brought back via toolbar customization.
Status bar icon is no longer being displayed in Firefox version with add-on bar (there is no real status bar).
List of blockable items can now be searched both by localized type name as well as by the corresponding filter option (forum topic).
When recommended subscriptions are being added the language no longer becomes part of the subscription title.
An “Adblock Plus” menu has been added to the classic Tools menu for reasons of keyboard accessibility, the Adblock Plus menu entry in the View menu has been removed.
Added a warning if a subscription contains disabled filters (forum topic).
Fixed: Don’t create new filter groups for filters being added if a user-defined group is already available (forum topic).
Fixed: Using context menu prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
Lots of polishing, especially on the new Filter Preferences dialog.

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Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus · 2011-12-05 12:19 by Wladimir Palant

The development build last Friday introduced a new feature that took many people by surprise: Allowing acceptable ads. Sorry about that, I am usually trying to announce large functionality changes in a timely manner but that didn’t work this time. As of Adblock Plus 2.0b.3277 the current state is:

“Allow non-intrusive advertising” option is enabled by default for all users but the ones using privacy filter lists (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy’s Tracking, Adverisity Privacy). The documentation explains why it has to be enabled by default.
The first-run page notifies users about this change, opt-out works by clicking “Filter Preferences” and unchecking the option there.
On the technical side, this option simply represents an additional filter subscription. The documentation describes how to view this filter subscription or disable the special treatment for it.
There is a forum topic with lots of my replies to questions concerning this feature.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

Filter search is now possible in the Filter Preferences.
“Collapse blocked elements” option has been renamed into “Hide placeholders of blocked elements”.
“Count filter hits” is now a visible option.
Added “Reset hit statistics” filter action.
Added warning for filter subscriptions requiring a newer Adblock Plus version.
Updating all filter subscriptions is now possible using Ctrl-Shift-T keyboard shortcut (not visible in the user interface).
Fixed: Filter groups should also have “Show/hide filters” in their Actions menu.
Fixed: ABP menu still has the old “Preferences” menu item.
Fixed: Dragging a filter subscription might display as a button or menu being dragged.

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New Filter Preferences dialog and more · 2011-12-01 17:25 by Wladimir Palant

Huge changes that were living on the “experimental” branch just landed, we are now in the Beta phase for Adblock Plus 2.0. The most notable changes in Adblock Plus 2.0b.3255:

New Filter Preferences dialog replaces the old Preferences dialog and hopefully makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
Custom filter groups can be created, you are no longer limited by the groups created automatically.
Filter groups can contain multiple instances of the same filter (most importantly comments).
Filter subscription is now added automatically on startup, the user no longer needs to confirm (but can easily revert the decision).
The new Backup and Restore functionality allows exporting all filter data as well as custom filters only. The latter is identical to the old Import/Export but will restore filter groups.

While this functionality is finally usable we are not done yet. There are multiple known issues, most of them should be fixed over the course of the next few days:

Resetting hit counts isn’t possible yet.
Searching filters isn’t possible yet.
There is no warning message if the filter subscription requires a newer Adblock Plus version.
Filter actions and “Add filter” don’t appear disabled even when they are unavailable.
Creating filters via filter composer will create a new special filter group even when user-defined groups are available.
Filter editor ignores Home and End keys (not sure whether this can be fixed).
Actions executed on many filters (delete or remove) might take too long.

Some things that won’t change:

Enter key closes the Filter Preferences dialog, F2 has to be used to start editing a filter.
Filter editor no longer has a Close button.

If you find something else, please comment here or report a bug.

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Better "Add filter" dialog · 2011-11-05 00:50 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.1.4.719 features an improved “Add filters” dialog that webpage can no longer mess with. This allowed implementing two long-standing requests:

Filters can be modified before adding.
The dialog buttons can be triggered with Enter and Esc keys (use Shift-Enter to insert a newline into the list).

Dragging the window around is still somewhat awkward (displayed mouse cursor doesn’t match the action, window sometimes won’t follow) but other than that it seems to work fine.

In other news:

If Adblock Plus fails to “remember” your filter subscriptions, that’s Chrome issue 103018. Removing the directory “LOCALAPPDATA\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System\Origins” restores normal functionality. Current development builds will automatically re-add default subscriptions on data loss (a lame workaround but the only one possible it seems).
Support for abp: links has been added yesterday so that the “Subscribe” links on the subscriptions page can be used now.

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Tags: adblock plus chrome development builds

Improved data format in Chrome · 2011-10-26 10:21 by Wladimir Palant

Note: The changes described here caused a critical regression in the non-experimental builds (blocking essentially disabled), sorry about that. This issue has been fixed in Adblock Plus 1.1.4.708.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.1.4.705 underwent a major rearchitecturing effort. Main goal was to use the same data format as Adblock Plus in Firefox, a number of other areas have been touched as well. The expected changes:

Google Chrome 9 and above is required now (previously Google Chrome 6 was still supported, at least theoretically).
Local Storage now only contains options, the actual filter data is stored in files on disk. One side-effect of this change is that quota-related errors should be gone. Locating the files on disk isn’t trivial but they can be viewed under filesystem:chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/persistent/ in the browser (filesystem:chrome-extension://cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb/persistent/ for the release version). File format is identical to patterns.ini in Firefox.
There should no longer be hangs when some user interface features are used. If you still see a hang after some button is clicked or similar please let us know.
Downloading of filter subscriptions works the same as in Firefox now. This means among other things that EasyList downloads will be distributed to the various mirrors instead of being limited to the main download mirror. Only limitation: filter subscriptions that change location by means of an HTTP redirect (301) cannot be recognized.
Some improvements to the Options user interface have been implemented. This is most noticeable in “Filter lists” tab: it now only displays the subscriptions that have been added. More subscriptions can be added by clicking “Add filter subscription” – this works same as in Firefox now, also the list of recommendations is identical (recommendations matching browser’s user interface locale are highlighted).
Messaging around “Easy create filter” feature has been simplified. There should be no visible effects of this change.

If you notice that something doesn’t work as expected please let us know.

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Do-Not-Track support in the experimental builds · 2011-10-04 20:50 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Adblock Plus for Chrome 1.1.4.698 the experimental builds come with Do Not Track support that works the same as in Firefox. The current implementation isn’t the most efficient, this will be improved later.

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Dropped support for old browser versions including Firefox 3.5 · 2011-10-04 10:59 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Adblock Plus 1.3.11a.3172 old browser versions based on Gecko versions older than Gecko 1.9.2.13 will no longer be supported. This change is performed to simplify Adblock Plus code as well as to make regression testing easier again. This means in detail:

Firefox 3.5 is no longer supported. Anybody still using it should update to a current Firefox version ASAP given that Firefox 3.5 is no longer supported by Mozilla and has known security issues. Similarly, Thunderbird 3.0 is no longer supported.
Only reasonably recent Firefox 3.6.x releases are supported (Firefox 3.6.13 or newer). If you are running one of the older versions you should update ASAP, at least to Firefox 3.6.23 which is the current release on this branch. Similarly, users running Thunderbird 3.1.x need Thunderbird 3.1.7 or newer (preferably Thunderbird 3.1.9 which is the current release on this branch).
Firefox Mobile 1.1 is no longer supported, at least Firefox Mobile 4.0 is required.
SeaMonkey 2.0 is no longer supported, at least SeaMonkey 2.1 is required.
Prism support has been removed. With Prism development no longer being continued the last release uses an outdated Gecko version.
Songbird support has been removed. Even most current Songbird releases use an outdated and insecure Gecko version, so using Songbird’s browser component is not recommendable.

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Experimental pop-up blocking support · 2011-10-03 16:29 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.11a.3162) added support for blocking pop-ups directly, working for Gecko 1.9.2.6 (meaning Firefox 3.6.6) and higher. Filters will not block pop-ups by default, only if the $popup type option is specified. So one can use the filter ||livejasmin.com^$popup to block all pop-up windows opening livejasmin.com. Or one could use ||livejasmin.com^$popup,domain=example.com to prevent only example.com from opening such pop-ups. Pop-ups opened by a page will appear in the list of blockable items and can be blocked from there.

For subscription authors: if you add pop-up blocking rules to your filter list you might want to do it in a backwards compatible way: ||livejasmin.com^$popup,image,~image. This makes sure that the filter doesn’t block anything in Adblock Plus versions that don’t know the $popup option.

Known issues:

If the pop-up opens in a new window rather than a new tab you will briefly see the pop-up window. This window is closed before running any code ~~and sending any network requests~~ however. Edit: The initial network request is actually being sent in this case but is canceled immediately after receiving HTTP headers.
For each pop-up opened you will see an additional about:blank entry in the list of blockable items. This is due to how Gecko works, a new window always loads about:blank before loading the actual pop-up target.
For same-origin pop-ups (opening page and pop-up are from the same host) you will get only the about:blank entry. This is a Gecko limitation, so for such pop-ups you will only be able to block all pop-ups or none.

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