Adblock Plus and (a little) more
AMO moving into the right direction · 2007-01-12 02:21 by Wladimir Palant
Thanks to morgamic for telling me this, I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise — Addons.Mozilla.Org has made a first move towards raising the quality bar. The autogenerated spyware-infested Conduit-based toolbars have been disabled, all 93 of them. Any new submissions will be automatically rejected. Way to go, AMO!
Firefox security: the real picture · 2007-01-05 12:37 by Wladimir Palant
I have seen many people complaining about how Firefox is no more secure than Internet Explorer. Usually this impression comes up when people read the long lists of security bugs fixed with every maintenance release. Since I have reported a few security bugs myself and could observe how Mozilla deals with those, I knew well that Firefox is still incomparably more secure than Internet Explorer — and now there is proof. Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006 has the data.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 and impact on addon downloads · 2006-12-21 01:30 by Wladimir Palant
I am looking at the development of addon downloads on Addons.Mozilla.Org for the last few days and I really have trouble understanding it:
Firefox 2.0.0.1 is out - yay! · 2006-12-20 11:17 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 2.0.0.1 has just been released. Please upgrade as soon as possible, it fixes a bad JavaScript bug in Firefox 2.0 that caused all sorts of strange effects especially when Adblock Plus was installed (bug 355161). In particular this fixes the incompatibility between Adblock Plus and the Google Notebook extension and probably a number of other issues that couldn’t be tracked down properly.
Spell checker rants · 2006-12-11 14:21 by Wladimir Palant
The spell checker in Firefox 2 is certainly a great feature. I have already seen lots of people write this and I agree. And yet, it has some certain deficiencies that make me use it far less than it could be. The reason is: it seems to assume that you always write your texts in the same language. Yet I am frequently switching between languages, I write texts in English, German and Russian all the time. And going to the context menu, digging into the languages menu and choosing the right language is just annoying, especially for a short text. There is also another issue: switching languages takes a while, and for a huge dictionary like the German (10 MB) it becomes a major annoyance.
No good deed goes unpunished · 2006-12-04 00:19 by Wladimir Palant
I started a little experiment — downloaded all extensions from addons.mozilla.org (AMO), unpacked them and tried to find security holes by searching for specific strings. As expected, it wasn’t all too difficult, one can easily find a dozen vulnerable extensions in an hour, and that not even accounting for the fact that there is a certain unpopular class of extensions on AMO all sharing the same buggy code. The only reason I didn’t hit all too many high profile extensions was that I was going through the extensions in alphabetical order instead of going by popularity.