Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 0.7.2 release candidate · 2006-10-24 08:25 by Wladimir Palant
A new Adblock Plus 0.7.1.2+ development build (2006102416) has been uploaded.
Installation
https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/
Changes
- New languages: Slovenian, Hungarian, Vietnamese
- Implemented new pattern matching algorithm to speed up processing of large filter lists (blog entry)
- Reduced impact of object tabs on page’s HTML code, no more problems with WYSIWYG editors like the ones used in some blogs (blog entry)
- Optimized processing
- Switched to new icons (forum thread)
- Thunderbird is now supported (bug 13008)
- Installation in Songbird is possible (no user interface integration yet)
- Option “block remote ads in local pages” now considers mailboxes to be local pages
- Fixed typos in contents.rdf for the Norwegian and Ukrainian locales
- Fixed checkboxes in welcome dialog on Linux (forum thread)
- Fixed item width in welcom dialog in SeaMonkey
- Now blocking content on keyword: URLs as well (bug 15072)
- Changed welcome dialog to allow only one subscription to be selected (forum thread)
- Only left the really recommended and universal subscriptions in the welcome dialog, other subscriptions moved to a website that is linked from the welcome dialog and new subscription dialog (forum thread)
- Removed URL validation when deciding whether the URL uses to a whitelisted scheme (bug 15072)
- Made about:blank an exception, isn’t whitelisted by its scheme any more (bug 14793)
Known issues
SeaMonkey Mail not yet supported- No toolbar icon in SeaMonkey Mail (statusbar icon shows up instead)
- Songbird integration is absolutely minimal, only way to get to Adblock Plus Preferences is via File / Extensions / Options
Thunderbird: Whitelisting for blog entries should still go by website and not by sender- Thunderbird: Blockable items list always detached in Thunderbird — Thunderbird doesn’t allow sidebars
Thunderbird: Toolbar icon is only created automatically in either main or message window but not both- Thunderbird: Default keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-A for Adblock Plus Preferences conflicts with a default keyboard shortcut (Edit / Select / Thread)
- Status bar icon is always located at the very end of the status bar and probably cannot even be moved with Organize Status Bar
- Danish, Korean and Traditional Chinese locales contain some English strings
Notes
- This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 0.7.2 (release expected in a few hours).
- Site whitelisting concept for Thunderbird mails is different from Firefox. In Thunderbird you whitelist mail addresses, e.g. a filter might look like
@@|mailto:*@foobar.com|— no blocking will occur in mails from foobar.com then. RSS feed entries are whitelisted by their website as usual. - Adblock Plus 0.7.2 should contain all the same strings as this development build, no more string changes will be taken.
Comment [4]
Commenting is closed for this article.
El_Matzo · 2006-10-24 22:58 · #
Opening the add filter subscription and clicking “Alle bekannten Abonnements anzeigen” (German version)only a page with a 404 error gets shown. (http://adblockplus.org/de/subscriptions)
Guess this will be very easily fixed and the extension itself doesn’t have to be changed or you just wanted to put that site online when you release the final.
I just wanted to mention it.
Anything else in this build works great for me. Thank you very much for developing this (even actively! :) )
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Yes, the page it there now – though it isn’t translated yet (maybe in a few hours).
koan00 · 2006-10-25 00:12 · #
A few quick questions about hit counters:
1) Is there a technical reason there are no hit counters on the Element hiding rules?
2) Are the hit counters used internally in any way (ie to prioritize the most hit rules in the checking logic)?
3) If the answer to #2 is no, is there any plan to disable hit counting? I Assume it takes very little processing, but some may wish to tweak for every last ounce of performance :)
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
1) Yes. I have to yet find a way to receive a notification when an element hiding filter applies. Those are converted into CSS rules and processed by the browser, I don’t get any info on what happens then.
2) No. I am using a more useful “prioritization” algorithm (see Investigating filter matching algorithms).
3) No again, it won’t give you any noticeable gain – otherwise I wouldn’t have implemented the hit counters.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Oh, and would you please stop using an invalid email address? It is used to send you a notification when I reply – and I get all the bounces. I promise that I’m not going to sell your address. In fact, I don’t even want to look at it.
koan00 · 2006-10-25 02:48 · #
“Oh, and would you please stop using an invalid email address?”
Surely =)
And not to beat a dead horse (just curious), in your other post you note that RegEx’s fall back to the trivial method. I was just thinking you already have valuable meta data about the RegEx’s, so why not use it to pre-sort the RegEx’s based on number of hits?
Thanks!
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Because it doesn’t help. Most of the time Adblock Plus has to check items that don’t match any filter – fortunately for us the internet has something other than ads as well. And for these items you will always check every filter. This makes ordering of filters almost irrelevant (nobody would notice a difference for sure). So the solution is not to optimize regexps – the solution is to get rid of regexps entirely. And I think Adblock Plus 0.8 will come closer to this goal again.
koan00 · 2006-10-25 16:46 · #
So you plan on removing a useful feature, that has been used for years, because it operates a bit slower?
Interesting. Seems a bit over the top to me. I would think it would be more than sufficient to educate the user about issue and let them decide which they prefer.
Cheers
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I’m not planning to remove anything – I am planning to offer a better replacement and deprecate regular expressions. They will stay there for compatibility reasons however.