Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 2.6.1 release candidate available · 2014-05-09 15:38 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.6.0.3812 for Firefox is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.6.1, which we currently plan to release next Tuesday (May 13th). We fixed several issues, especially some affecting Adblock Plus on Firefox for Android:
- No first-run page appears in Firefox for Android and no filter subscription is selected by default (issue 99).
- Opening settings from the first-run page doesn’t work in Firefox for Android (issue 255).
- Adblock Warning Removal List gets disabled on update even if the user opted in earlier (issue 424).
- Home and End keys don’t work when editing a filter (issue 256).
- Wrong filter rule suggested when blocking an address that contains a hash part (issue 247).
- Adblock Plus icon reappears after restart if removed from the toolbar in SeaMonkey (issue 186).
Data loss on Google Chrome hopefully fixed · 2014-04-29 11:26 by Wladimir Palant
There have been complains about data loss on Google Chrome for quite some time already. People complained about all filters data suddenly being gone — without any obvious reason and without any way to reproduce the issue. It seems that we’ve finally found the cause of this issue and it has been resolved in Adblock Plus 1.7.4.1165 for Chrome. Please report any issues you notice with this development build. The current plan is to have a new stable release next Tuesday, then we will see whether the fix worked (the issue is rare enough that it isn’t possible to tell anything before rolling out the fix to the entire user base). If you are interested, the details are listed in issue 361.
Element Hiding Helper integration with Inspector restored · 2014-04-15 16:26 by Wladimir Palant
When Firefox 10 introduced the Inspector tool we promptly started using it in Element Hiding Helper. Selecting elements with the Inspector tool is easier than with Element Hiding Helper and one only has to click the EHH button in the Inspector toolbar to hide it then. Unfortunately, the developer tools API wasn’t quite as stable as expected and changes to it broke the integration again. Sorry that it took us so long but starting with Element Hiding Helper 1.2.4a.458 everything should be working again. Element Hiding Helper 1.3 is currently scheduled to be released next Tuesday (April 22nd).
Adblock Plus 2.6 for Firefox release candidate available · 2014-04-15 11:51 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3795 development build is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.6, the release is currently scheduled for next Tuesday (April 22nd). The list of changes in this release:
- Made sure Adblock Plus initialization doesn’t delay Firefox startup (issue 117).
- Switched to a faster way to access Adblock Plus data on disk (issue 153).
- Fixed regression in Adblock Plus 2.5.1: Adblock Plus initialization takes longer for each new window opened (issue 238).
- Fixed: Firefox Sync integration sometimes won’t work (issue 261).
- Fixed: Filter search in Filter Preferences was broken in newer Firefox versions.
- Fixed: Wrong button type displayed for Adblock Plus immediately after customizing toolbar in Firefox 29 and above (bug 981543).
- Fixed: Homepage link is displayed in Filter Preference even if the subscription doesn’t define a homepage (issue 48).
- Various code cleanup tasks (issue 137, issue 301).
New approach to hard drive access · 2014-03-21 19:14 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3785 we switched to a new way to access the hard drive. Ideally there shouldn’t be any visible changes, Adblock Plus simply won’t cause occasional delays in Firefox on hard drive access. It might also fix the startup delays some people are still reporting despite our previous changes. The required functionality is only available starting with Firefox 19 which is why this development build and future Adblock Plus releases will no longer install in older Firefox versions.
Technical details: Adblock Plus now uses OS.File API to make sure the hard drive is never being accessed on the main thread. Previously Adblock Plus was using rather weird hacks to achieve the same goal, that worked only for reading and writing files however — not for renaming files for example.
Faster Firefox startup · 2014-03-14 22:54 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve received lots of complains over time about Adblock Plus slowing down Firefox startup considerably. It’s not that we didn’t listen but this is really a tricky problem. However, Brian Nicholson from Mozilla pointed out that there is a relatively simple solution and this solution has been implemented now. Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3778 Firefox seems to start up almost as fast with Adblock Plus as it does without. The only disadvantage should be that Adblock Plus is ready a bit later and the first page loading might still have ads.
Now to the scary part: in theory, this change might cause data corruption. So if your filters suddenly get corrupted (only some filter/filter lists load), please let us know.
Fixing data corruptions in Adblock Plus for Safari · 2014-03-13 09:50 by Sebastian Noack
When we ported Adblock Plus from Chrome to Safari, and realized that there was no fileSystem API, we moved to localStorage for storing filter lists. Short after it turned out that we can’t store more than about 1 MB in localStorage on Safari. So we moved to a WebSQL database for the filter lists, while sticking to localStorage for other persistent data.
After we released Adblock Plus for Safari Beta, users began to complain that settings were automatically reset. The reason therefore was that both localStorage and WebSQL data are cleared when Safari cleans up browsing data.
Then we became aware of Safari’s settings API. Safari doesn’t reset settings when clearing browsing data, nor do they seem to have a limit of size. So we will soon migrate to hidden settings for storing persistent data including filter lists.
Australis theme support · 2013-12-02 12:25 by Wladimir Palant
Two weeks ago the Australis theme landed in the Firefox nightly builds. This is easily the largest Firefox user interface change since Firefox 4 and it is still being tested — it will take several months until it hits stable releases. Along with lots of visual improvements (like making toolbar customization discoverable) the toolbar customization mechanism has been overhauled, a long overdue change. The necessary changes to support the new toolbar customization now landed in the Adblock Plus development builds (starting with Adblock Plus 2.4.0.3745), these can now rely on Firefox to remember the position of our icon correctly instead of reimplementing everything. In addition to everything working correctly, there are only few changes you should expect:
- The default position of our icon is the main toolbar again, not the add-on bar (the add-on bar is gone with the Australis theme, this concept proved nonviable).
- The icon can be placed in the Australis “Customize and Control” panel and will show up with a large icon there as well as in the customization palette.
- Australis will not remember the previous position of the icon. This means, if you uncheck “Show in toolbar” in the Adblock Plus preferences and then check it again the icon will be displayed at its default position rather than the position where you’ve previously put it. From what I can tell, this is the only piece of functionality lost, it’s a minor one however.
There is one more change in this development build: the tooltip on images in Blockable Items list will show the image again if is cached (this feature was broken for some time).
First-run page redesigned - again · 2013-10-05 12:29 by Wladimir Palant
We are continuing to improve the Adblock Plus first-run page to make sure it provides the best possible overview. The current round of development builds (Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3725 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.5.5.998 for Chrome and Opera) contains a redesigned first-run page again, I hope you like it. If you are updating from a previous version this page won’t show up of course — you can still open it by typing the address into the location bar manually. The address is chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html in Firefox and chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome and Opera.
Note: The “Contributor Credits” link at the bottom of the first-run page isn’t hooked up yet, this page will be online soon however.
In addition, the Chrome and Opera builds now have an ad counting feature. Whenever you click the Adblock Plus icon you should get the number of ads blocked on the particular page and the total number of blocked ads (similar information is shown in the icon’s tooltip in Firefox). The total number will only consider the ads blocked after updating to this build. Please don’t comment on the design of this feature, we are working on an improved design already.
File upload crash fixed · 2013-10-04 13:25 by Wladimir Palant
There have been a number of reports about Internet Explorer crashing on file upload when Adblock Plus is installed (e.g. this one). These issues should be resolved as of Adblock Plus 1.0.541 for Internet Explorer.
We’ve got a few reports of Adblock Plus still hanging Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 even with the previous development build. So far we weren’t able to reproduce these issues however.