Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Almost all feature work for Adblock Plus 1.1 done · 2009-06-11 11:00 by Wladimir Palant

A new Adblock Plus 1.1alpha+ development build (2009061108) has been uploaded. This development build is almost feature complete now, further Adblock Plus 1.1 development will focus on stability rather than features.

Installation

https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/

Changes

• Dropped compatibility with old browsers and cleaned up the code, now requiring at least: Firefox 3.0.9, SeaMonkey 2.0b1, Thunderbird 3.0b3, Songbird 1.2b1, Prism 1.0b1
• Added handling of redirects, the redirect address now shows up in “Blockable items” as well and can be blocked
• Added explicit support for blocking fonts (@font-type CSS directive in Firefox 3.5)
• Added support for flexible anchors at start of filter: ||example.com/foo/ will match http://example.com/foo/bar and http://test.example.com/foo/bar but not http://badexample.com/foo/bar or http://evilsite.com/?http://example.com/foo/bar (forum topic)
• Added support for ^ character that will match a single separator character or end of address (forum topic)
• Clearing browsing history in Firefox now clears hit statistics in Adblock Plus as well (forum topic)
• Filter composer: Added flexible anchors as an option (“at the beginning of domain name”) (forum topic)
• Filter composer: Added “example.com^” as fourth suggestion (forum topic)
• Filter composer: Added warning when adding a filter to a disabled filter group (forum topic)
• Moved all application-specific code to the overlay file corresponding with that application
• Started refactoring of browser integration code which runs in its own context now
• Changed the way “add subscription” links work, these can now only be triggered by user clicking a link
• Added diagnostic page displaying all errors related to Adblock Plus: chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.html
• Added Adblock Plus version and source code revision to the information displayed on chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.html
• Added “Re-enable Adblock Plus on this page” context menu items for whitelisted pages, removes/disables the filter responsible for whitelisting
• Blockable items: Added “document source” column (domain name to be used for the $domain filter option, forum topic)
• Blockable items: Creating a filter for an item matching a disabled exception rule is possible again (forum topic)
• Blockable items: Added “Disable this filter on example.com” context menu item for user-defined filters (adds the required $domain option)
• Preferences: “slow filter” warning is now a separate list column which can be used for sorting
• Preferences: “close” button moved to the right side of the filter editor, made the button use Firefox 3 look
• Preferences: improved position calculations for the filter editor, no longer makes the text position change
• Preferences: using browser’s real find bar now instead of faking it
• Preferences: fixed slowdown when enabling/disabling many element hiding rules
• Preferences: insert imported and pasted comments before the filter that follows them (forum topic, forum topic)
• Preferences: fixed a scenario where the same filter might appear twice in the list
• Fixed: webpages can easily detect “Collapse blocked elements” option
• Fixed: ABP icon updates its status every two seconds, hogs CPU time
• Fixed: opening Preferences in current Firefox nightlies selects wrong tree row (worked around bug 489881)
• Fixed: detection of background images breaks the context menu in Firefox nightlies
• Fixed: an error is reported to console on first run (patterns.ini not found)
• Fixed: “Disabled on …” doesn’t work correctly if the exception rule already exists but is disabled
• Fixed: “Disabled on …” doesn’t work correctly with rules that already exist in filter subscriptions
• Fixed: Toolbar icon doesn’t show up in SeaMonkey 2.0
• Fixed: ABP fails to initialize itself in Prism
• Fixed: Indentation of some menu items of the toolbar icon’s menu too large in Songbird
• Fixed: Adding a filter subscription in Preferences that redirects to a different address causes download failure

Known issues

• Current Element Hiding Helper release won’t work (EHH development build is available)

Source code revision: 336e57bf8540

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [2]

1. Ares2 · 2009-06-11 11:53 · #

   Does “almost feature complete” mean there is place for one more? :D http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3919

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Actually, it means that there are three left:

   • Domain exceptions for element hiding
   • “Re-enable filter foo on example.com” in blockable items context menu
   • Object tabs improvements

   All but the last one should require only small changes and all but the first one are optional if they turn out to be too hard. Getting http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3966 into this release was a consideration but there are too many things still unclear meaning that it is very unlikely to make it.

2. mr greenhatch · 2009-06-11 19:37 · #

   excellent features particularly the first one.

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