Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Updated roadmap (Adblock Plus 1.3.5) · 2011-02-04 17:07 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve just put Adblock Plus 1.3.5 on the roadmap. I mentioned this release a bunch of times but wasn’t sure whether we are actually going to release it or whether we will go to Adblock Plus 1.4 immediately. Now we have some nice improvements in the development builds (DNT header support, faster filter matching and startup, less memory used for element hiding) and releasing these improvements before Adblock Plus 1.4 definitely seems worth it. This is what Adblock Plus 1.3.5 will be about, a bunch of improvements under the hood that will hopefully make live better for some people. Adblock Plus 1.4 on the other hand is planned as a major user interface redesign.
One thing is important enough to be repeated: faster filter matching algorithm will come in Adblock Plus 1.3.5, not Adblock Plus 1.4 as originally announced. The point of delaying this change was to give subscription authors time to update their filters. It seems that by now all major subscriptions are done, their filters are fast with both the old and the new algorithm. This means that this feature can be released earlier.
Comment [7]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Anonym · 2011-02-05 15:53 · #
This is great to hear. Thanks Wladimir !
dfagon · 2011-02-08 08:44 · #
You plan to add support for jetpack?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I suggest you reformulate the question because the way it is now it makes no sense. Jetpack is a tool for building extensions, the end result is a regular Firefox extension – we have that already and don’t need Jetpack. If you ask whether I plan to use Jetpack to build Adblock Plus – no, I don’t. It will give us no advantages whatsoever (plenty of disadvantages however). If you ask whether Adblock Plus will support installation/update without restart – this feature is available to non-Jetpack extensions as well but has lots of drawbacks (https://adblockplus.org/blog/how-many-hacks-does-it-take-to-make-your-extension-install-without-a-restart).
Marijo · 2011-02-09 18:13 · #
Thanks for the heads up!
The caching feature will hopefully compensate a bit for the continuously growing filter lists and their effect on Firefox’s startup time.
Dan · 2011-02-14 05:39 · #
I think dfagon ment – Will you plan to port AdBlockPlus to jetpack when stable build of Chromeless browser is released ? (It will only support jetpack’s extensions)
(http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/)
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Chromeless is an experiment, I doubt that a stable release is even planned for it. Why should I go out of my way to support a prototype?
Dan · 2011-02-15 01:51 · #
If you try read between lines – you’ll see that Chromeless is the one that MoFo planning to replace FF in the future ;) .
Do you think why MoFo replaced cute xul extension manager with the ugly html one in FF4b ;) ?!Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I can read between lines – and Chromeless is really an experiment by Mozilla Labs. It has the potential to replace Prism/WebRunner and bring web applications to the desktop. The chances that it will ever replace Firefox are extremely slim, already because the effort of turning it into serious competition for Firefox would be enormous. If anything, it will help deciding on the future direction of Firefox development – but it would still be Firefox going there, not Chromeless.
As to the extension manager, there are lots of reasons for the new user interface (look around in Jennifer Boriss’ blog). In this particular case HTML allows easier integration of addons.mozilla.org into that user interface (“Get Add-ons” is a regular webpage). And there is a general tendency at Mozilla to move away from XUL towards HTML. There are pragmatic reasons that don’t let this tendency get too far – developing a user interface with native look and feel in HTML is near impossible.
digitalangeldonnadj · 2011-02-15 04:41 · #
I hope this newer version can block this website called www.smarter.com
Adblock Plus absolutely WILL NOT block that ad.
Here’s why…
When I right click on it, Adblock doesn’t come up, but instead a popup wants to happen. Otherwords, it CAN’T be blocked. I tried putting just the website in the filter, but it’s not working. I can’t grab the entire link, because it’s a RIGHT CLICK FAIL actually. I looked in the HTML view page source and STILL couldn’t find it to block exact thing.
Maybe that’s why it’s called Smarter.com. Right now it’s smarter than Adblock Plus cause we can’t right click to get Adblock Plus to come up in the first place.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I sincerely recommend changing dom.event.contextmenu.enabled preference to “false”, this will prevent websites from hijacking the context menu.
Other than that, the context menu isn’t the only way to block something in Adblock Plus. You can use the list of blockable items (see https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_basics#objects, second “Show me how this is done” link). Feel free to create a thread in the forum if you need more help.
digitalangeldonnadj · 2011-02-15 11:16 · #
Okay, that’s WAY over my head. I don’t know what a dom.event.contextmenu.enabled preference is. Where is that?
I’m computer literate to a degree, but I’m not THAT savvy. So I’m totally lost. Sorry about that.
I know about the “block” tabs appearing over flash objects, and that usually works. The ad in question isn’t flash nor javascript. It’s blocking my right click action to even bring up Adblock in the first place.
I guess you’ll have to encounter the ad yourself in order to know what I mean. That ad is all over the cheezburger.com websites.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Google is your friend ;)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config
As I said, check the second “Show me how this is done” in that FAQ entry – it deals with the cases where blocking something through the usual user interface isn’t possible for some reason. You then have to press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the list of blockable items, find the item in question there and double-click it to block.