Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Shortcut keys are hard · 2008-03-24 00:44 by Wladimir Palant
When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.
TomTom HOME and add-ons · 2008-03-17 10:17 by Wladimir Palant
I have been writing very little about what I am doing in my day job, maybe it is time to change this. As some might know, I am a developer in the team behind TomTom HOME, an application that allows users to manage their TomTom navigator devices (e.g. installing new content on them, sharing it with other users or doing backups).
Great Java news · 2008-02-25 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.
Keeping an eye on plugins · 2007-12-15 01:00 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that one critical aspect of browsing is finally getting the much deserved attention: plugins. As a regular browser user you are hardly ever reminded of their existence, yet over time I learned that they have a very significant impact on browser’s stability and memory usage. For Adblock Plus, a significant percentage of all reported issues is related to plugins. Part of the problem is the fact that plugins are basically independent programs and the browser has hardly any control over what they do.
What is going on with Internet Explorer? · 2007-12-06 12:43 by Wladimir Palant
So now we know: the next Internet Explorer version will be called Internet Explorer 8. What a surprise. Thanks, Dean, for telling us. What we don’t know is just about everything else about Internet Explorer 8 because the IE team has been maintaining strict radio silence about it. And what we get is a bullshit answer that “the whole world relies on Internet Explorer and we must be very careful about what we say.”
Getting application name and icon right with XULRunner · 2007-06-29 02:21 by Wladimir Palant
Despite a few disadvantages, XULRunner is a great tool for application development. The more disappointing it is when the very basic things fail: getting your application recognizable by its icon and application name. Setting icon and title for application’s windows is easy, and usually it is sufficient. However, Windows taskbar has the option “Group similar taskbar buttons” (enabled by default), and for a XULRunner application this group is displayed with XULRunner’s icon and the name “xulrunner”.
Mozilla Developer Day: XUL vs. HTML · 2007-06-26 01:10 by Wladimir Palant
Mozilla Developer Day in Paris was great. I still cannot believe that I sat at the same table with Daniel Glazman and Benjamin Smedberg (but in our modern times there is proof). There were lots of people I always wanted to meet in person and many interesting talks. The Joost guys delivered a very impressive demo. But the best of it were the discussion sessions. 70 XUL developers in one room — this doesn’t happen too often.
Java and Firefox memory usage · 2007-04-04 15:59 by Wladimir Palant
I have been using Sun’s old Java 1.5.0_06 runtime for quite a while, there simply wasn’t a good reason to waste time updating it. When investigating a Java-related crash I decided to check whether it will happen with a newer runtime (1.6.0-b105 was current at that time). Surprisingly, the crash disappeared even though this crash happened in Gecko code and not in the Java plugin.
Encouraging innovation · 2007-03-16 23:28 by Wladimir Palant
I had to laugh out loudly on this one. The IEBlog announces the winners of the IE Add-ons Contest. Guess who won the Grand Prize?
Mozilla hurting Google by recommending Adblock Plus? · 2007-02-01 15:12 by Wladimir Palant
Quite a few blogs picked up the idea that there is something strange about Mozilla recommending Adblock Plus. They quote Mozilla’s financial statement saying that Mozilla earned $50 million in 2005 from search engine cooperation (mostly Google though at least Yahoo contributed as well) which is indirectly income from advertisements.