Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Further improvements to SeaMonkey and Thunderbird support · 2009-07-09 18:23 by Wladimir Palant

A new Adblock Plus 1.1alpha+ development build (2009070916) has been uploaded. This version further improves the way Adblock Plus works in SeaMonkey 2.0 and Thunderbird 3.0 nightly builds.

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 1.2, 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)
• Added support for domain exceptions in element hiding, e.g. “example.com,~foo.example.com##foo” or “~example.com##foo” (forum topic)
• “Block” button on plugins (e.g. Flash or Java) is only shown when the mouse is on the plugin
• Clearing browsing history in Firefox now clears hit statistics in Adblock Plus as well, can be disabled with the hidden extensions.adblockplus.clearStatsOnHistoryPurge preference (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
• Cleaned up data management code, made sure Adblock Plus doesn’t use up more memory than necessary
• 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
• Fixed: Domain-restricted filters are applied to pages opened from disk
• Fixed: Focus issues when closing list of blockable items in Firefox nightly builds

Known issues

• Subscription list on first run in Thunderbird: entire mail window is closed when clicking “Subscribe” (bug 503299)
• SeaMonkey: Toolbar button looks ugly with the Modern theme (Modern theme doesn’t allow properly adding buttons other than the ones coming with SeaMonkey)

Source code revision: 3414709ba5c8

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [1]

1. Bob · 2009-07-09 20:30 · #

   Google’s new Chrome Browser is in real need of AdBlocker. Since the browser is open source it should be possible.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   See the corresponding forum discussion: http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2866

   Being (moderately) open source is not enough.

Commenting is closed for this article.