Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Extension conflicts, 2009 edition · 2009-11-24 11:01 by Wladimir Palant
I realized something yesterday. I thought about the add-ons that caused me trouble lately by breaking Adblock Plus (and often the browser as well) — .NET Framework Assistant, Skype Extension, Ask Toolbar (a.k.a. Zone Alarm Toolbar a.k.a. Foxit Toolbar). I noticed that they all have something in common: none of these extensions is being hosted on AMO, consequently none of them had to pass AMO’s review process. So while AMO’s review process still receives its fair amount of criticism and the AMO team continues to improve — apparently, it managed to achieve an important goal. The AMO editor team enforced good coding practices successfully enough to make conflicts between extensions hosted on AMO rare, it is mostly external extensions causing the trouble now. My congratulations to the editors and to the entire AMO team!
Atomic orbital viewer with WebGL · 2009-10-04 17:19 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I found an application that I wrote more than 10 years ago — atomic orbital viewer. Back then I got interested in the pictures of atomic orbitals you get presented in chemistry class, found the special-case formulas for electron distribution and generalized them. And then I wrote an application to visualize these orbitals. Since I didn’t have access to 3D hardware or even literature on 3D graphics I ended up reinventing everything — yes, I used to have that kind of time back then. What came out was a Turbo Pascal (DOS) application where I’ve written almost everything myself, including low-level mouse handling and GUI library.
The return of .NET Framework Assistant · 2009-08-10 11:34 by Wladimir Palant
Do you remember the commotion about Microsoft silently installing its .NET Framework Assistant extension through Windows Update? And how everybody was upset about this being forced down their throats, even without an “Uninstall” button in the add-ons window? And how Microsoft fixed at least the "Uninstall" button? And how that fix broke Adblock Plus and NoScript temporarily, causing tons of complains for both extensions? Well, the show isn’t over yet, lean back and watch.
Apology to Adblock Plus users - and call for participation · 2009-08-02 23:31 by Wladimir Palant
I messed up, really sorry about that. Some people already noticed that Adblock Plus 1.1 release didn’t have the quality you would usually expect. Right now, it looks like there are something like three distinct regressions of which I can only reproduce one so far. And what is worse, I went on vacation only a few days after the release and didn’t have a chance to properly investigate these issues — even less to fix those. So users who are affected and can no longer use Adblock Plus can only revert to Adblock Plus 1.0.2 for now.
Selecting countries on a map in Firefox 3.5 · 2009-06-20 12:18 by Wladimir Palant
Since everybody is talking about Firefox 3.5 demos these days I though that I would dig up one that I created myself in November. It allows selecting areas of complex shape on an image — e.g. countries on a map. This idea didn’t end up being used for anything but somebody else might find it useful.
Ten years ago I already had to solve this problem. How do you present the user with a map and let him choose a country? Back then I ended up using Win32 API and two bitmaps — one to display to the user and a second invisible bitmap to let the application translate clicks into actual countries by checking the color corresponding to the click position. The visible bitmap was static meaning that it wasn’t possible to show the selected country on the map. But that wasn’t necessary anyway back then. And now I had to solve the same problem, this time for the Mozilla platform.
Adding Weave support to an extension · 2009-06-01 14:00 by Wladimir Palant
Weave is a pretty cool extension, it lets you sync your Firefox/Fennec data (history, bookmarks etc.) across multiple computers via some server — and that while the browser is running, no need to restart it. So for example, you might have Fennec running on a Pocket PC and Firefox on your desktop, both logged into the same Weave account. You add a bookmark in Firefox. On next sync (which you can trigger manually) this change will be uploaded to the server. And next time Fennec syncs this bookmark will simply appear in your bookmarks list while the browser is running. Weave works with single bookmarks rather than taking the list as a whole meaning that this update will not affect the other bookmark changes you’ve performed in Fennec in the meantime (those will simply be uploaded to the server so that Firefox can get them on next sync). Add to this encryption, all data is being encrypted locally before being sent to the server — so while the server can tell how many bookmarks you have, it won’t be able to read the actual data. Still, if you don’t trust Mozilla’s server you can run your own without much trouble.
Extension update patterns · 2009-05-06 15:36 by Wladimir Palant
I recently released Adblock Plus 1.0.2 to fix a regression that would affect any user upgrading to Firefox 3.0.9. In the end, Adblock Plus upgrade was released only six days before Firefox 3.0.9 and the big question is of course — was that enough time? How many users ended up using the new Firefox release with an outdated Adblock Plus version?
Attention NoScript users · 2009-05-01 22:54 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make its money from ads. And to make sure that somebody sees these ads it goes pretty far. For example, it opens the changelog webpage (full of ads of course) on every single update of the extension, even though the NoScript FAQ claim that it happens only on major updates (yes, if you dig into it you will find the preference to disable this behavior – but how many people do that?). And updates coming roughly each week ensure that this page is opened fairly often.
Sad news · 2009-04-06 14:06 by Wladimir Palant
I got very sad news on Saturday. My friend and long-time Adblock Plus contributor Rick Petnel passed away Friday night. I was informed about his illness two weeks ago but simply refused to believe that it might end like that. Sadly, there is no way of denying it any more.
The monetization dilemma · 2009-03-25 13:02 by Wladimir Palant
There has been a fair amount of discussion lately on the topic of earning money with extensions. Yesterday I read Kent James’ blog post – and only a few minutes later I noticed yet another mail titled “Commercial offer” in my inbox. Now these are typically about some crazy business model they need my help with, usually something along the lines of replacing ads with other ads and redirecting website’s income into your own pocket by doing that. Not this time. An employee of a search engine company suggested I add a checkbox to the post-install Adblock Plus page which will add their search engine to Firefox and change user’s homepage to their entry page (all that restricted to the country where they operate). And they would pay me for each change performed of course.