Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Element Hiding Helper 1.1 is feature complete · 2010-10-27 06:00 by Wladimir Palant

Element Hiding Helper 1.1b.20101027 development build contains all the features that will go into the final version, the outstanding changes should only be translations and bugfixes now. This build requires an Adblock Plus 1.3 development build. If things go well, both Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Adblock Plus 1.3 will be released on November 2nd.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Dropped support for Firefox 3.0, Songbird versions before Songbird 1.9 and Midbrowser
Compatible with Firefox 4 again (worked around bug 604736 among other things)
Better code to mark selected elements, solves a number of issues
Selection will no longer descend into data: frames (element hiding rules cannot be applied to elements in such frames)
New “lock/unlock selection” command
Alternative command hotkeys can be specified for languages where it isn’t clear which keyboard layout is being used (e.g. Russian)
Element Hiding Helper has its own About dialog (reachable via Tools / Add-ons) and extension icon now
Moved preferences to extensions.elemhidehelper.* branch (old preferences are imported automatically)
Hotkey configuration will automatically ignore combinations that are already taken, specifying multiple options in extensions.elemhidehelper.selectelement_key preference is possible. The new default is Ctrl-Shift-K and Ctrl-Shift-S (the latter will be used on Firefox 4).
Shift+Mousewheel can be used to triggger wider/narrower commands
Composer: Better escaping of dangerous characters in CSS code (particularly for id and class attributes, forum topic)
Composer: Warning when “My Element Hiding Rules” group is disabled
Composer: Tag name isn’t checked by default if id or class attributes are present (forum topic)
Composer: Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.composer_defaultDomain now controls which domain suggestion will be selected by default (forum topic)
Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.acceptlocalfiles allows creating rules for local files (but won’t make these rules apply when used in Adblock Plus)

First Adblock Plus 1.3 Beta · 2010-10-19 06:00 by Wladimir Palant

With Adblock Plus 1.3b.20101019 we are entering the beta phase for Adblock Plus 1.3. Most important thing to note is that the issue reporter is pretty much done, at least the part living in the extension. The server-side part of it will still need some work but reports submitted now should reach subscription maintainers eventually — so please enter “TEST” as comment when you are testing the feature so that these reports can be sorted out easily.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

Blockable items tooltip will display information on disabled tooltips as well (forum topic)
Triggering a subscription update always forces a re-download now
ABP icon tooltip no longer counts disabled filters and subscriptions
Improved filter matching performance by 20-35%
Better filter composer suggestions (forum topic)

Reporting filter issues comfortably · 2010-09-25 18:35 by Wladimir Palant

Users often have problems finding the right contact address to report filter issue and when they find it they struggle getting together the necessary information. Which is why Adblock Plus 1.3a.20100924 development build comes with an issue reporter that will collect all the information and send the report automatically. You can find it in the menu of the ABP icon. The forum topic on this feature has some slightly outdated screenshots.

This feature is not complete yet:

A number scenarios need special handling, e.g.: user didn’t add any filter subscriptions, Adblock Plus is disabled, user selected “other” as issue type. The special handling here will be added later.
If data transmission fails Adblock Plus currently isn’t of much help. The idea is to offer sending the data in a browser window — it is more useful when dealing with SSL issues for example.
A privacy policy needs to be written so that it can be linked to from the issue reporter.
Subscription maintainers aren’t currently being notified. So chances are that nobody will see your report unless you post a link to it in a forum.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

Element hiding now has a significantly lower impact on startup time. My measurements indicate that this will lower the overall startup delay for a typical Adblock Plus configuration by 10-15%.
Default action for the ABP icon is now to open the menu — with the issue reporter opening the list of blockable items will no longer be what most users want. To change it back you can change extensions.adblockplus.defaulttoolbaraction (old value was 1).
The add-on bar landed in Firefox 4. The new development build will use it as the default location for the ABP icon.
Toolbar icon looks “right” in Firefox 4 now.
Filter subscription added by other extensions will no longer persist, that extension will need to re-add the subscription on every browser start (makes sure the subscription goes away automatically if that extension is uninstalled).
Filter subscription downloads are better distributed across the week

New way to store data · 2010-08-27 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The new development build (1.3a.20100826) has gone through some major rearchitecturing, the way it stores data changed radically. The purpose of this change is to improve performance and memory use: Adblock Plus no longer stores more data than necessary and will do only as little bookkeeping as absolutely necessary. The areas affected by this change are:

List of blockable items (will no longer show all data immediately when opened, instead it will take a few seconds to fetch the data)
Toolbar icon tooltip (now counts the actual hits so that the number might be higher than what you see in the list of blockable items)
Filter composer dialog (adding a filter will no longer re-apply filters to all of the current window, only to the element you opened the composer for)
Context menu (behavior should be unchanged except for a recent regression fixed – handling of background images should be correct again)
Tabs on Flash and Java (behavior should be unchanged)
Blocking of redirects (I hope that the behavior is unchanged here)

I already noticed a side-effect: in Firefox 3.0/3.5 touching a node that is hidden causes element hiding rules to be reapplied. Since opening the list of blockable items touches nodes you might see hit count for element hiding rules go up when you do it. This issue is no longer present in Firefox 3.6.

Adblock Plus Watcher updated for Adblock Plus 1.3a and renamed · 2010-07-08 05:25 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus Watcher has been renamed into Diagnostics for Adblock Plus. Diagnostics 1.1.3a.20100708 restores compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a, it isn’t compatible to Adblock Plus 1.2 and below however. There are more changes coming, in particular better management of the dependency on Adblock Plus. But this version is usable again. Other changes:

New extension icon, no longer reusing the icon from Adblock Plus
Own About dialog, no longer opening the dialog from Adblock Plus

Compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a restored · 2010-05-20 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Element Hiding Helper 1.1a.20100520 restores compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a, it isn’t compatible with Adblock Plus 1.2 and below however. Other changes:

Dependency on Adblock Plus is managed “manually” now. This means that rather than becoming disabled in Add-on Manager without obvious reason Element Hiding Helper will now show a message suggesting to install/update/enable Adblock Plus and allowing to accomplish that with one click. Note: a message that a restart is necessary isn’t being displayed yet.
Marked as compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2.

Changes to Adblock Plus extensibility mostly done · 2010-05-20 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with todays development build (1.3a.20100520) other extensions can extend Adblock Plus again. While details of the Adblock Plus API might change, the latest Element Hiding Helper development build (1.1a.20100520) should work well. Adblock Plus Watcher will be updated as well soon.

Other changes since Adblock Plus 1.2:

Major architectural changes to allow Adblock Plus to install without restart in Firefox 4 — this work is mostly done but currently blocked on Firefox issues (especially bug 564667).
Marked compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2
Made sure image maps can be blocked via context menu (bug 16605).
Fixed a long-standing bug: comments could be interpreted as element hiding rules (topic 5484).
Removed code checking for Adblock and Filterset.G installations, both are pretty rare by now.
Removed background images as a separate type, these are now reported with type “image” as well ($background option is equivalent to $image for reasons of backwards compatibility). Distinguishing background images and “regular” images was broken at least since Firefox 3.6.

New info page for development builds · 2010-05-06 10:52 by Wladimir Palant

Most people using development builds no longer update them manually, reading development build announcements isn’t absolutely necessary either. It was time to update the website to consider these changed circumstances — requiring people looking for a download link to open a blog post doesn’t make sense any more. Instead I created an info page that people are send to when they click on “development builds” link. I tried to keep it short yet still give all the important information (and yes, I still consider some information more important than the installation link which is why I put it first). Subscribing to the announcements is merely a recommendation now.

Incompatible changes in current builds · 2010-05-02 11:38 by Wladimir Palant

As some already noticed, the current development builds (starting with 1.2.0+.2010050102) no longer work with extensions relying on Adblock Plus such as Element Hiding Helper or Filter Uploader. I should have announced this in advance, sorry about forgetting that. Right now is the rare occasion when Adblock Plus has to break compatibility with such extensions (last time was Adblock Plus 0.7.5.2).

Second Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-22 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010042202) is the second release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. The scheduled release date is April 30th.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Updated translations: 27 locales are done, two more are complete but being tested
Opening a new tab from the list of blockable items respects browser preferences, esp. with regards to opening in background (bug 22722)
Fixed some cases where opening tabs from Adblock Plus in Thunderbird/SeaMonkey would trigger the default browser unnecessarily
Improved Fennec (Firefox Mobile) integration, using the site menu in Fennec 1.1 to display Adblock Plus status
Thunderbird: moved Adblock Plus toolbar icon to the message header which is a better place for it
A bunch of minor tweaks around toolbar icon in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
Added $elemhide option for exception rules to disable element hiding on a page, unlike $document this option doesn’t affect frames embedded in a page or items matching blocking rules (forum topic)