Adblock Plus and (a little) more
It is good to be right - we are No. 1! · 2006-11-21 12:29 by Wladimir Palant
December last year I had a discussion with rue, maintainer of the original Adblock extension. We were talking about the the necessity of major changes, and I was trying to convince him that these changes are long overdue. At some point rue proudly proclaimed something like: “We stayed in the Top5 for the last year — not bad considering we didn’t have any changes at all”. My answer was: “That’s not an achievement, this project has the potential to be No. 1”. And there we are, less than a year later — Adblock Plus is now the most popular extension on Addons.Mozilla.Org. It is good to be right, I knew it was possible!
I think it is very important to note that I couldn’t have done this alone. There are lots of people who I would like to thank. I will try to extend my contributors list that is currently mainly listing people who helped making this extension international. Adblock Plus has been translated into 32 (thirty-two!) languages — and that’s not a one-time job, these guys stay around to update their translations regularly for major Adblock Plus releases. I think the people who run Babelzilla also deserve great thanks, it would be absolutely impossible to manage this many translations without it.
But then there are filter list maintainers: rick752, Cédric Menge, Robbie Groenewoudt, Malte Kraus. And that’s only the filter lists I recommend directly in Adblock Plus, the actual list is much longer. By creating solid filter lists that can be used by everybody they play a very important part in bringing Adblock Plus to the mainstream. Even the most simple user interface would still be too much hassle for the majority of people if it weren’t for the subscriptions that make everything “just work”.
And then there is the community that gives me invaluable feedback. Here I am very grateful to Michael McDonald for building this great community that I then took over. There is IceDogg who was moderating the forums before I came to the project and who still helps keeping order in the forums. There is Matt Nordhoff aka Peng who is always helping other users with their problems. There are sheepy, Brian Yi aka Stupid Head, alta88 and many more (and I didn’t forget Rick and Cédric but I mentioned them above already).
Thank you all! I for my part still have lots of plans for Adblock Plus and don’t intend to stop. And I am counting on your help.
Comment [7]
Commenting is closed for this article.
MonztA · 2006-11-21 15:56 · #
Congratulations!
quirky · 2006-11-22 14:01 · #
Congratulations!
I can not imagine the web without adblock .. many thanks to everybody who helped for this project to become No1
wakaziva · 2006-11-22 19:19 · #
Congratulations!
Brian Yi · 2006-11-22 22:15 · #
Congratulations! You’ve put a lot of effort into Adblock Plus, and it has certainly paid off.
IceDogg · 2006-11-23 02:42 · #
Congrats to you Wladimir Palant! You’ve worked very hard on this. I can say one of the hardest (if not THE hardest) working developers of any extension. Great work you do and you always out do yourself.
The community (users) are great, you all are responsible for making Adblock plus number one. Thanks!
fox · 2006-11-23 15:40 · #
Congratulations Wladimir and Thank you all!!
ufo258 · 2006-11-27 00:25 · #
You put a lot of work into AdBlock Plus, this is my favorite extension. At home I have comcast cable but when I’m browsing the web from a slow connection, this pays off even more!