Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Managing locales · 2008-11-05 02:00 by Wladimir Palant

Managing locales is painful. Babelzilla is a big help but with 49 locales around (of which nine are incomplete) making sure that all locales included in the release are functional takes lots of time. With a new release coming up, I decided to invest some time into improving my scripts to automate as much as possible.

Fake "hg rebase" implementation · 2008-10-24 11:13 by Wladimir Palant

After doing two merges in Mercurial when I couldn’t push my changes due to totally unrelated changes in the remote repository, I noticed that mq works great but having a fully automated solution instead of running several commands manually would be desirable.

Generating JavaScript documentation · 2008-10-21 10:05 by Wladimir Palant

After years of neglecting code documentation I finally came around and added JSDoc comments to much of the Adblock Plus core. The next problem now — what tool should I use to extract these comments and generate documentation? Problem is, none of the off-the-shelf tools know JavaScript 1.8.

Dealing with source code in Mercurial · 2008-10-20 13:00 by Wladimir Palant

Dear Lazyweb,

I like it a lot that checking out XULRunner code is a simple hg clone command now rather than a special checkout script — but how do you check out the source code of a specific release?

MAOW presentation slides · 2008-09-22 10:47 by Wladimir Palant

I was invited to give a talk at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris this weekend so I tried to give people an idea what it takes to maintain an extension project that already got rolling. The presentation went fairly well even though I could have told much more and I had to scrap the slide on security because the time has simply run out. My slides can be viewed here (note that FullerScreen extension messes the slides up badly, as we discovered just before the presentation).

Don't bother reporting your plugin issues to me · 2008-08-27 12:18 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus is based on content policies, and content policies don’t get along with plugins too well — so I am used to dealing with plugin issues that are regularly reported as bugs in Adblock Plus. Typically, in those cases I try to reproduce the issue, create minimized testcases and report the problem at bugzilla.mozilla.org (if there is no such report already of course). Finding the actual source of the problem and fixing it would require more time than I can spend but thanks to Boris Zbarsky and Johnny Stenback this still didn’t work out too bad, all the issues I am aware of have been fixed in Firefox 3.

And who comes to visit your web site? · 2008-08-07 01:49 by Wladimir Palant

I often see people complaining that the page impressions on their site don’t match their ad impressions. Apparently, a large percentage of their visitors (you see numbers like 50% mentioned) don’t see their ads. And it is easy enough to find the guilty party — ad blocking software. The enemy is found, the world makes sense again, and the energy can be spent on solving the “issue”.

Only that something doesn’t make sense: judging by numbers of active daily users, no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed. And I doubt that other ad blockers have a significantly larger user base.

Using XULRunner platform · 2008-07-15 11:24 by Wladimir Palant

It is now more than a year that I started working on TomTom HOME, an application to manage personal navigation devices. The original version of this application (TomTom HOME 1.x) was written entirely in C++ and used wxWidgets library. After some time it became an unmaintainable mess, and a decision was made that a better platform for user interface development is necessary. I wasn’t around when XULRunner was chosen as this platform but I am happy that it was — that’s how I came aboard, two months before the first release of TomTom HOME 2. Now we are closing in on a fifth major release, and it is time to summarize how XULRunner did as a platform.

Users with add-ons much more likely to upgrade? · 2008-07-02 14:00 by Wladimir Palant

Henrik Gemal posted on current Firefox market share. Apparently, current Net Applications figures say that only 24% of all Firefox users already switched to Firefox 3. Interestingly, the percentage amongst Adblock Plus users seems much higher. The numbers on addons.mozilla.org indicate 43% Firefox 3 users. This is confirmed by the numbers from popular filter subscriptions, e.g. 43% of EasyList users (largely US-based) and more than 45% of “Cedrics Liste” users (mostly German) are already using Firefox 3.

Emulating Window.openDialog with JavaScript arguments in an XPCOM component · 2008-07-02 13:27 by Wladimir Palant

Opening a XUL dialog from JavaScript is usually easy, you use Window.openDialog method that is almost the same as Window.open but also accepts some parameters that the dialog will be able to access via Window.arguments collection. But what if your JavaScript code runs inside an XPCOM component doesn’t have a window? Still not very hard, you use nsIWindowWatcher.openWindow method then. The tricky part here is passing parameters to the dialog however. I had to resort to hacks here in the past, and other people seem to have issues with that as well, so I thought I would share the solution.