Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus screencast online · 2009-03-13 16:02 by Wladimir Palant
Ian Ozsvald and Richard Mitchelson from ProCasts offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable:
Hidden cost of (not) using Venkman · 2009-03-12 19:12 by Wladimir Palant
I came across a Venkman “feature” that was so unexpected that I even filed a JavaScript engine bug on it. Only after Gijs Kruitbosch asked me to test with a clean profile I realized that the JavaScript performance issue I was seeing wasn’t inherent to Firefox but rather something the Venkman extension was responsible for. That’s right, Venkman is degrading JavaScript performance just by being installed, even if you don’t use it. I had Venkman installed “just in case” and this was a big surprise to me.
Mixing absolute and relative lengths in SVG clip paths · 2009-03-12 12:14 by Wladimir Palant
A supposedly simple task turned out to be pretty hard and now I am left guessing whether I am dealing with an SVG spec issue or with a Gecko bug. I need to make corners of a XUL element transparent, something that should be easy if you apply SVG effects to it.
Avoiding naming conflicts in overlays · 2009-02-16 23:12 by Wladimir Palant
XUL overlays are a great mechanism for extending existing functionality. However, there is a catch — any scripts loaded by an overlay are sharing the namespace with the scripts loaded by the original page and the scripts loaded by other overlays (typically from other extensions). So if extension Foo defines a global variable myGreatVar and extension Bar chooses to define a global variable myGreatVar as well, bad things will happen — both extensions will end up accessing the same variable and usually both extensions will behave erratically because of that. Same happens with functions, if two scripts define the same global functions the second function definition will override the first. The situation is worst for constants — a constant cannot be redeclared meaning that one of the extensions will cause an error message.
More extension puzzles · 2009-02-11 17:42 by Wladimir Palant
Since Haploid solved my previous puzzle way too fast, here is another one: what is that page really trying to load? And why is it that NoScript and Adblock Plus disagree so much on that — none of the dozen domains NoScript is showing show up in Adblock Plus and the one request showing up in Adblock Plus doesn’t show in NoScript.
Analyzing huge piles of code · 2009-02-10 23:37 by Wladimir Palant
Back in August, at the Firefox Summit, I promised Giorgio Maone to properly analyze NoScript. Trust me, better that than the alternative. And it is not that I forgot. I tried, really. Problem is, Giorgio isn’t a big friend of modularization. Most of NoScript code is contained in two files, one being 2000 and the other whooping 8000 lines long, all of its 500 features nicely intertwined. He isn’t a big fan of documentation either, keeping code comments to a minimum as to prevent code bloat. Finally, he isn’t a big fan of consistency and made sure that each feature is triggered only under its very unique conditions. In short, the code is a mess.
Now it got me as well · 2009-01-15 23:24 by Wladimir Palant
Giorgio knew very well of course that I was only waiting for a chance to tag him, so he tagged me first. Argh… Whatever, here are the rules:
On the new Ctrl+Tab behavior · 2009-01-09 12:23 by Wladimir Palant
While I usually spend most of my time with stable browser versions, I still use Minefield frequently. And Minefield builds now have the new Ctrl+Tab behavior again. While this feature will certainly help most users navigate around their tabs, I cannot help myself disliking it. And now I finally understand my problem: usually I don’t even look at the screen when switching tabs.
Microsoft joining the ranks of referrer spammers? · 2008-12-19 08:52 by Wladimir Palant
I just noticed an unusually high amount of requests in my logs with referrer being Live Search, all with the same search request. Now that doesn’t make sense because I usually get very few people from there, about 0.5% of the requests referred by Google. And I just don’t believe that everybody suddenly decided to search for “adblockplus”. Finally, all requests came in for http://adblockplus.org/ and were redirected to http://adblockplus.org/en/ — but Live Search doesn’t even list the main page, it links directly the the English one (or German, or French, depending on your location).
Managing locales - now the generic way · 2008-11-05 17:44 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, my previous post gave some people the impression that I am pushing my scripts as a generic solution for all locale validation problems. That’s certainly not the case, what I’ve done there is a quick and dirty solution for a problem I was having with Adblock Plus. I tried to detect as many of the common locale problems as possible even if the solution only works for Adblock Plus.