Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Closed my LinkedIn account · 2012-06-08 16:30 by Wladimir Palant
A bunch of posts on Planet Mozilla reminded me that there is still one social network that I am a member of. So it was time to reconsider whether having a LinkedIn account was worth it.
Preventing background tabs from wasting your computer's resources · 2012-05-12 13:27 by Wladimir Palant
Taras recently blogged on how websites manage to ruin Firefox performance by continuing to do something even though their tab is no longer active — they keep updating the view that you cannot see. He wondered whether it would be possible to suspend these tabs from an extension. I looked into this and there is a way to suspend all timeouts for a tab — something that an extension could use. Getting the details right wasn’t quite trivial but I think that my extension gets it right now: Suspend background tabs. Enjoy!
Google Chrome and pre-installed web apps · 2011-11-15 09:47 by Wladimir Palant
Google recently launched a redesigned version of its Web Store where one can install extensions and web apps. One particular feature caught my attention: it marks the extensions that you already have with a check mark. How does the web page know which extensions you have installed?
EU MozCamp, theme development, add-on localization with adofex · 2011-11-13 18:17 by Wladimir Palant
I’m still at the EU MozCamp 2011 but Mitchell Baker already gave her closing speech and things are wrapping up. It has been an interesting weekend, a bunch of add-on related sessions among other things. One interesting conclusion that I made from the discussion: the rapid releases aren’t a real issue for extension developers and don’t create more work. Ok, I’ve suspected that much already but it was nice to have other add-on authors confirm this. In the discussion session with extension developers this topic didn’t even come up, as opposed to localization for example which is a significant pain point. AMO’s automated compatibility checks for extensions are working nicely and mark most add-ons as compatible already during the Aurora phase. There are plans that go beyond that as well and it sounds like extension compatibility will mostly become a non-issue for end users in a few Firefox releases (at least as long as binary XPCOM components aren’t used).
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 0] · 2011-10-10 10:43 by Wladimir Palant
Please note that this will be the only post to be syndicated to Planet Mozilla, the other parts of this series will appear in my blog only — I can imagine that most readers of Planet have very little interest in what I am writing here. If you are interested in the full analysis of the results, please visit my blog in a few days.
At the moment we have 1360 responses to the user survey which is more than enough to start analyzing the results. There will be some more responses before the survey ends but we don’t expect to get much more than 1500 responses and the overall results shouldn’t change significantly.
On rapid releases and version numbers · 2011-08-19 18:45 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve spent a little too much time arguing about rapid releases and version numbers in a German-language forum. In the end, I think that the benefits of rapid releases outweigh their disadvantages. It is indeed important for Mozilla to bring out new features faster, working more than a year on a release like it happened for Firefox 4 is unacceptable. Seeing Mozilla fall behind on caniuse.com and the like isn’t great, Mozilla shouldn’t become the factor slowing down progress on the web. Also, as an add-on author I like that release dates are predictable now, it allows planning in advance.
Update on AMO's performance tests · 2011-05-18 18:02 by Wladimir Palant
I forgot to update my overview of AMO’s performance measurements for their latest test run on May 14th, done it now. As Alice Nodelman notes, a bunch of bugs has been fixed on the technical side. Six weeks after the campaign announcement it finally looks like the most critical bugs are fixed and the numbers are mostly reliable.
New round of AMO's performance tests (2011-04-16) · 2011-04-17 17:42 by Wladimir Palant
I uploaded the overview for the new round of AMO‘s performance tests. The bug that skewed most Windows results so far has been fixed, so the results are more usable now.
The wrong way of allowing users to make informed decisions · 2011-04-13 15:15 by Wladimir Palant
One point I probably didn’t stress often enough in my previous blog posts on AMO‘s add-on performance measurements is how poorly percentages reflect the real effect of add-ons. At least I see no indication that the people responsible for this campaign intend to change their mind and provide users with more accurate information. Please allow me to explain once again why these numbers are misleading (bug 648742 reworded).
Overview for Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-11 16:55 by Wladimir Palant
I got tired of digging through logs so I created an overview page for AMO’s add-on performance testing results. This shows both the absolute slowdown values as well as percentages for each operating system, along with a link to the corresponding logs. It also shows the standard deviation for each test and flags results that are affected by issues known so far.