Adblock Plus and (a little) more

More small improvements · 2008-06-25 04:00 by Wladimir Palant

A new Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5+ development build (2008062501) has been uploaded. Only en-US locale is available at the moment.

Installation

https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/

Changes

• Added new filter composer dialog that is opened to add a new filter
• Added hidden preference extensions.adblockplus.usefiltercomposer to choose between filter composer and preferences dialog for adding of new filters (this preference might be removed later)
• Moved warning that Adblock Plus is disabled from preferences to composer dialog, made it possible to enable with a single click
• Blockable items: Changed default action for blocked items to “add exception rule” instead of “edit filter”
• Blockable items: Tooltip now shows the filter subscription name in addition to the filter
• Blockable items: Added “Copy filter” item to the context menu
• Blockable items: Multiple selection and copying of multiple addresses/filters now possible
• Blockable items: Added “Select all” item to the context menu
• Fixed: Subscriptions are sometimes loaded from browser cache
• Added hidden preference extensions.adblockplus.savestats to allow turning off hit statistics (useful if patterns.ini is put into a version control system)
• Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 are no longer supported
• Flock 1.2 is supported now
• Cleaned up some backwards compatibility hacks
• Removed ancient drag&drop handling code (not discoverable and not advertised anywhere)
• Fixed: Dates in Preferences window would sometimes use wrong character encoding (bug 441370)
• Preferences: Pasting filters that contain spaces (especially comments) now possible (bug 18920)
• About dialog: Made it possible to select and copy version number
• Made sure filter composer warns the user on regexps and too short filters
• Preferences: Showing exclamation mark for too short filters as well now
• Preferences: Added a tooltip explaining the meaning of the exclamation mark
• Fixed: Findbar in preferences dialog has no icons (Firefox 3)
• Mac OS X: Preferences menu changed into toolbar to make sure it stays inside the window (forum topic)

Known issues

• Filter composer should have a help text for “custom pattern” field
• Detached sidebar doesn’t work
• Composer dialog doesn’t warn on regular expressions
• Preferences window broken in SeaMonkey 1.1
• Exclamation mark tooltip is cut off in Firefox 2

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [3]

1. chewey · 2008-06-25 08:12 · #

   Yikes: Installs fine in SeaMonkey 1.1.9 – and still works with the existing patterns.ini

   However, the filter list in the preferences window is completely empty, and new filters cannot be added either.

   I know SM 1.1.x starts to become a bit outdated compared to the now released FF3 – but it is still the newest official build available, so even if the new functionality wouldn’t work, you should at least avoid breaking things.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   I have no intention do drop compatibility with SeaMonkey 1.1. However, I will usually test in Firefox 3 and sometimes in Firefox 2 – I expect SeaMonkey to just work, and I will do proper testing there when it is time to release (unless somebody reports bugs of course).

   In that case, the Mac OS X change broke Preferences – apparently, the component I use to detect Mac OS X doesn’t exist in SeaMonkey. Ouch…

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Ouch… The component is available on SeaMonkey but it is SeaMonkey’s own implementation – and it is broken.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Anyway, fixed.

2. chewey · 2008-06-25 08:42 · #

   Uhhh… let me rephrase that: It doesn’t work at all in SM 1.1.9

3. Simon · 2008-06-26 02:08 · #

   > Made sure filter composer warns the user on regexps and too short filters

   What about moving that warning right below the custom filter textbox? Wouldn’t make things jump around too much while editing too short a filter – and it’d even be clearer as to what the warning applies to.

   And unrelated: What about updating the Close button on the list of blockable items (or just using the shipped one by having either |.findbar-closebutton| or |#sidebar-box .tabs-closebutton| apply to the button)?

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   The filter suggestions are inside a scrollable box, so any warnings below the text field will likely be cut off if there is a scroll bar.

   Unfortunately, FindBar API is too unstable to be used even in the applications that ship with it (this means only Firefox right now). That means that I will have to continue bringing my own code and my own images. I’m not even quite sure about updating these images for Firefox 3 – the images are different depending on your operating system.

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