Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Using Page Inspector in Firefox 10 and higher to hide elements · 2012-01-19 11:51 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 10 will introduce a new Page Inspector feature, you can read more about it here. This feature allows selecting elements a lot better than the current Element Hiding Helper. You can either right click an element and choose “Inspect Element” – the element will be selected in the Inspector and you will be able to click up/down in the hierarchy line at the bottom. Or you can choose “Inspect” from the Web Developer menu, this will let you select an element similarly to how you would do it with Element Hiding Helper. Once you click an element the selection is fixed, you can click the “Inspect” button to continue selecting. Starting with Firefox 11 there will also be a very impressive 3D View, something that was previously provided by the Tilt extension.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2b.372 will now add an “Hide with ABP” button to the inspector toolbar. This allows you to select an element with the Page Inspector and then click this button to open rule composer. If you use a pre-release Firefox version — please test this feature. Element Hiding Helper 1.2 should be released in a week, in time for Firefox 10 release.
In other news, all issues related to making Element Hiding Helper restartless should have been resolved by now. If you experience any issues, please comment in this post or create a forum topic.
Element Hiding Helper: the restartless edition · 2012-01-04 14:00 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Element Hiding Helper 1.2a.361 the Element Hiding Helper extension installs and uninstalls without a browser restart as well. You can also enable or disable Element Hiding Helper immediately in the Add-ons Manager. However, you will still need to restart your browser when updating from an older extension version because this older version cannot shut down while the browser is running. As with the Diagnostics extension, a reasonably new application version is required (at least Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8, SeaMonkey 2.5), old versions are no longer supported.
Another important change: Element Hiding Helper will no longer warn you if Adblock Plus isn’t installed, we will instead rely on AMO to communicate this to users. One reason for removing this check is that Adblock Plus should also become restartless in future which will make checking for its presence a lot more complicated.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.4 released · 2011-12-08 14:50 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.4
Previous release had a bug which caused it to malfunction in Firefox versions before Firefox 10. This has been corrected now.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.3 released · 2011-12-08 10:22 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.3
Changes
- Fixed: Element selector prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
- Fixed: Some websites display their content on top of element markers.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.2 released · 2011-09-16 14:45 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.2
Changes
- New icon, also added a large version of the icon (forum topic)
- Showing preview is now selected by default (forum topic)
- Improved default attribute selection (forum topic)
- Corrected handling of whitespace at the end of ID attribute (forum topic)
- Removed Lithuanian translation, it is abandoned and unusable (forum topic)
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.1 released · 2011-03-11 17:50 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.1
Changes
- Improved escaping of attribute values
- Fixed: Hotkeys in the help tooltip are invisible with some browser themes
- Fixed: Clicking homepage link in About dialog doesn’t do anything
- Fixed: Preview doesn’t work correctly if the rule contains international characters
- Fixed: Broken composer dialog with
composer_defaultDomainpreference set to 1 or 2 if host name is an IP address
Element Hiding Helper 1.1 released · 2010-11-03 13:28 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Compatible with Adblock Plus 1.3, older Adblock Plus versions are no longer supported
- Compatible with Firefox 4, dropped support for Firefox 3.0
- Generating more efficient filters by default
- Better handling of elements with multiple classes
- More reliable approach to determine and mark element position
- Selecting parent node and moving to a different child no longer resets selection
- New “lock/unlock selection” command
- Ctrl+Mousewheel can be used to trigger wider/narrower commands
- Alternative set of hotkeys in some languages where two keyboard layouts are possible (e.g. Russian)
- Better styling of hotkeys in tooltips
- All preferences are now stored under extensions.elemhidehelper.*
- Hotkey Ctrl-Shift-S will be used if Ctrl-Shift-K is taken (e.g. in Firefox 4), can be changed in extensions.elemhidehelper.selectelement_key preference
- Own icon and About dialog, better mechanism to manage the dependency on Adblock Plus
- Composer warns now if the filter is being added to a disabled group
- extensions.elemhidehelper.composer_defaultDomain preference determines which domain suggestion is selected by default
- Added hidden preference to allow selecting in local files (rules created this way will have no effect)
Element Hiding Helper 1.1 release candidate available · 2010-10-30 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.1rc.20101030 is a release candidate, last chance to report bugs before Element Hiding Helper 1.1 is released (hopefully on Tuesday)!
Changes since previous announcement:
- Fixed: wrong window size calculation sometimes messed up displayed height of the elements
- Fixed: element marker position was updated every 20 milliseconds (endless loop)
- Better handling for the case that the marked element is not visible due to page scrolling
- About dialog: now shows localized homepage link
Element Hiding Helper 1.1 is feature complete · 2010-10-27 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.1b.20101027 development build contains all the features that will go into the final version, the outstanding changes should only be translations and bugfixes now. This build requires an Adblock Plus 1.3 development build. If things go well, both Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Adblock Plus 1.3 will be released on November 2nd.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Dropped support for Firefox 3.0, Songbird versions before Songbird 1.9 and Midbrowser
- Compatible with Firefox 4 again (worked around bug 604736 among other things)
- Better code to mark selected elements, solves a number of issues
- Selection will no longer descend into data: frames (element hiding rules cannot be applied to elements in such frames)
- New “lock/unlock selection” command
- Alternative command hotkeys can be specified for languages where it isn’t clear which keyboard layout is being used (e.g. Russian)
- Element Hiding Helper has its own About dialog (reachable via Tools / Add-ons) and extension icon now
- Moved preferences to extensions.elemhidehelper.* branch (old preferences are imported automatically)
- Hotkey configuration will automatically ignore combinations that are already taken, specifying multiple options in extensions.elemhidehelper.selectelement_key preference is possible. The new default is Ctrl-Shift-K and Ctrl-Shift-S (the latter will be used on Firefox 4).
- Shift+Mousewheel can be used to triggger wider/narrower commands
- Composer: Better escaping of dangerous characters in CSS code (particularly for id and class attributes, forum topic)
- Composer: Warning when “My Element Hiding Rules” group is disabled
- Composer: Tag name isn’t checked by default if id or class attributes are present (forum topic)
- Composer: Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.composer_defaultDomain now controls which domain suggestion will be selected by default (forum topic)
- Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.acceptlocalfiles allows creating rules for local files (but won’t make these rules apply when used in Adblock Plus)
Dropping support for Firefox 3.0 · 2010-10-25 14:37 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3 will be using a simpler and faster module to manage preferences. This module isn’t in Adblock Plus development builds yet but it is already used in the latest Element Hiding Helper build. As it turned out, this module isn’t working properly in Firefox 3.0 due to some JavaScript engine bug. It’s not clear which bug it is and whether it has a simple work-around. Frankly, I am not very inclined to spend time researching historical bugs in Bugzilla. Instead, Adblock Plus 1.3 and Element Hiding Helper 1.1 will no longer support Firefox 3.0. Anybody still using Firefox 3.0 should be reminded that Mozilla ended support for Firefox 3.0 in March 2010, and by now it has a large number of known and unpatched security issues — using it to browse the web is not safe. I highly recommend updating to the latest Firefox release (currently Firefox 3.6).