Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Overview of my bug reports on add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-09 19:52 by Wladimir Palant
In a comment to my previous blog post Jorge Villalobos asked me to file bugs on everything I think is wrong with the add-on performance measurements. So that’s what I did. The resulting list is long and I didn’t feel like creating a tracking bug so I better list the bugs in a blog post so that everybody (especially me) can find them.
On fluctuations in performance testing results · 2011-04-08 10:25 by Wladimir Palant
Yesterday I concluded that (with all bugs fixed) the results of Mozilla’s add-on performance measurements shouldn’t fluctuate by more than 2% of the Firefox startup time. Sorry, I was wrong. Later that day I noticed Read It Later, currently #43 on that list, supposedly causing 4% slower Firefox startup times. Yet this extension was definitely disabled during performance testing due to bug 648229. Does this now mean that each disabled add-on causes a 4% performance impact? Definitely not, disabled add-ons have no measurable effect on performance. So digging up the raw numbers for that add-on was definitely a good idea.
How reliable are Mozilla's performance measurements? · 2011-04-07 15:38 by Wladimir Palant
One of the replies to my previous blog post prompted me to take a closer look at the raw data from the add-on performance measurements. Can the numbers displayed on the blame list be trusted at all?
Some more details on Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-06 14:35 by Wladimir Palant
Mozilla Add-ons recently published an article on their effort to recognize slow add-ons. It comes complete with a list of worst offenders. Some media already picked up on that article and users are listening up. So everything is progressing nicely towards the goal — pressure on developers starts building up, I already had something like 10 people point out to me that Adblock Plus is number 12 on that list.
Do Not Track support in Adblock Plus [Updated] · 2011-03-25 23:22 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3.5 has been released today. One of the new features is support for the Do Not Track proposal which was previously only available in development builds. Given that this feature is not obvious I want to answer some questions.
Firefox 4 is there! · 2011-03-22 19:05 by Wladimir Palant
And since there are not enough blog posts about Firefox 4 on Planet, I am going to remind you that Firefox 4 is available now and you should go get it while it is hot. Seriously, do it. Lots of work went into this release and Firefox 4 is a huge step forward.
Rewriting JavaScript code with JSHydra · 2010-12-07 20:15 by Wladimir Palant
I was thinking about possible ways to rewrite Adblock Plus code automatically. One way to use it would be the online tool to find redundant filters. Due to its use of Adblock Plus code (which requires JavaScript 1.7) this tool would only work in Firefox. I didn’t really want to give up the convenient features of JavaScript 1.7, neither did I want to fork my code for this web tool which I would need to sync up regularly. Automated rewriting is really the only option but it is usually too complicated.
Why app-global extensions are essentially broken · 2010-08-18 12:44 by Wladimir Palant
Should I rather title this blog post “App-global extensions considered harmful”? I hope not because I see some valid use cases for installing an extension in a central location where it will be taken over regardless of the profile used. However, the current implementation in XULRunner/Firefox has some very nasty side-effects which make using this mechanism a bad choice. And there are apparently many people making the same experience.
How about making extension compatibility updates less annoying? · 2010-08-15 20:06 by Wladimir Palant
I came back from a vacation today and found around 20 mails in my inbox along the lines of “When will Adblock Plus be compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3?” There are probably a dozen more questions in the forum which I didn’t check yet. Now I know of course that Adblock Plus is compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 because lots of people (yours truly included) regularly use Adblock Plus in nightly builds. So all I had to do was to log into AMO and change the compatibility info for Adblock Plus.
XULRunner in large projects, part 4: Localization pitfalls · 2010-07-17 02:41 by Wladimir Palant
I am back from the Mozilla Summit and somewhat managed to process all the new information I got there. But instead of posting yet another summit summary or more summit photos (what, you didn’t know how great this summit was?) I have a far more boring topic for today: localization of XULRunner-based applications.