Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Faster Firefox startup · 2014-03-14 22:54 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve received lots of complains over time about Adblock Plus slowing down Firefox startup considerably. It’s not that we didn’t listen but this is really a tricky problem. However, Brian Nicholson from Mozilla pointed out that there is a relatively simple solution and this solution has been implemented now. Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3778 Firefox seems to start up almost as fast with Adblock Plus as it does without. The only disadvantage should be that Adblock Plus is ready a bit later and the first page loading might still have ads.
Now to the scary part: in theory, this change might cause data corruption. So if your filters suddenly get corrupted (only some filter/filter lists load), please let us know.
Fixing data corruptions in Adblock Plus for Safari · 2014-03-13 09:50 by Sebastian Noack
When we ported Adblock Plus from Chrome to Safari, and realized that there was no fileSystem API, we moved to localStorage for storing filter lists. Short after it turned out that we can’t store more than about 1 MB in localStorage on Safari. So we moved to a WebSQL database for the filter lists, while sticking to localStorage for other persistent data.
After we released Adblock Plus for Safari Beta, users began to complain that settings were automatically reset. The reason therefore was that both localStorage and WebSQL data are cleared when Safari cleans up browsing data.
Then we became aware of Safari’s settings API. Safari doesn’t reset settings when clearing browsing data, nor do they seem to have a limit of size. So we will soon migrate to hidden settings for storing persistent data including filter lists.
Australis theme support · 2013-12-02 12:25 by Wladimir Palant
Two weeks ago the Australis theme landed in the Firefox nightly builds. This is easily the largest Firefox user interface change since Firefox 4 and it is still being tested — it will take several months until it hits stable releases. Along with lots of visual improvements (like making toolbar customization discoverable) the toolbar customization mechanism has been overhauled, a long overdue change. The necessary changes to support the new toolbar customization now landed in the Adblock Plus development builds (starting with Adblock Plus 2.4.0.3745), these can now rely on Firefox to remember the position of our icon correctly instead of reimplementing everything. In addition to everything working correctly, there are only few changes you should expect:
- The default position of our icon is the main toolbar again, not the add-on bar (the add-on bar is gone with the Australis theme, this concept proved nonviable).
- The icon can be placed in the Australis “Customize and Control” panel and will show up with a large icon there as well as in the customization palette.
- Australis will not remember the previous position of the icon. This means, if you uncheck “Show in toolbar” in the Adblock Plus preferences and then check it again the icon will be displayed at its default position rather than the position where you’ve previously put it. From what I can tell, this is the only piece of functionality lost, it’s a minor one however.
There is one more change in this development build: the tooltip on images in Blockable Items list will show the image again if is cached (this feature was broken for some time).
File upload crash fixed · 2013-10-04 13:25 by Wladimir Palant
There have been a number of reports about Internet Explorer crashing on file upload when Adblock Plus is installed (e.g. this one). These issues should be resolved as of Adblock Plus 1.0.541 for Internet Explorer.
We’ve got a few reports of Adblock Plus still hanging Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 even with the previous development build. So far we weren’t able to reproduce these issues however.
"No Adblock Plus icon" issue in Firefox fixed for some scenarios · 2013-10-01 12:36 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3721 for Firefox should resolve a long-standing issue where some people didn’t have any Adblock Plus user interface (especially no icon) in the Firefox windows opened on startup. We could trace that issue back to delays in the Firefox startup sequence, e.g. caused by a master password prompt showing up before any Firefox windows. The result was Adblock Plus not “noticing” these windows when it initialized.
Technical details: This issue was introduced in February by our fix for bug 819561 (Pages opened by Adblock Plus during installation should open in the same PB window). There we switched to a different approach to enumerate Firefox windows. However, this enumeration approach turned out to ignore windows that were already open but didn’t become visible yet. Now we are combining both enumeration approaches to make sure that no windows are missed.
Fixed Enhanced Protected Mode support on Windows 8 · 2013-09-25 12:57 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that Enhanced Protected Mode support in the previous development build wasn’t quite working correctly, people using Windows 8 were experiencing hangs. This issue should be resolved in Adblock Plus for IE 1.0.537. Please help us test this new development build.
There is a crash when uploading email attachments that we would still like to fix before the release. Other than that no more changes are expected.
Enhanced Protected Mode support in IE · 2013-09-19 08:10 by Felix Dahlke
Adblock Plus for IE 1.0.533 now supports Enhanced Protected Mode, which is available since Internet Explorer 10 and enabled per default in Internet Explorer 11.
So if you’re on IE10 or IE11 and disabled Enhanced Protected Mode to make Adblock Plus work, please enable it again and help us test it.
Improvements to pop-up blocking in Chrome · 2013-03-05 15:51 by Wladimir Palant
Turns out that our previous release candidate wasn’t catching all the pop-ups. We’ve improved the approach in Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.3.4.919, that’s the new release candidate.
Pop-up blocking for Chrome · 2013-03-04 12:55 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve had pop-up blocking support in Firefox for quite a while already, starting with the 1.3.4.918 development build the same functionality is now available for Chrome. Again, this is to complement the built-in pop-up blocker for the cases where it fails, not to replace it. By now the subscription authors added filters for the most notorious unwanted pop-ups so these should be blocked immediately.
This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.4 for Google Chrome which is scheduled for release next Tuesday (2013-03-12).
Worked around AVG Security Toolbar issue · 2013-02-07 16:21 by Wladimir Palant
Current Adblock Plus versions are broken if AVG Security Toolbar 14.0.3.14 is installed. Investigation turned up a serious issue in AVG Security Toolbar affecting a lot more than just Adblock Plus and AVG has been notified about it. In the meantime the current Adblock Plus development build (Adblock Plus 2.2.3a.3629) implements a work-around that allows it to function properly nevertheless. Unless any issues pop up we are going to release Adblock Plus 2.2.3 with this fix next Tuesday.