Adblock Plus and (a little) more

libablockplus and better context information in Android [Done] · 2013-11-07 09:24 by Felix Dahlke

Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-11-29.

Current state

Right now, Adblock Plus for Android has its own integration of the ABP core code that leaves some things to be desired. Also, the proxy hardly attempts to gather any context information about resources, which makes false positives more likely and keeps us from adding some features.

Goals

Make ABP for Android use libadblockplus, the same library powering ABP for Internet Explorer, and gather context information about resources to pass in.

Approach

  • Use libadblockplus to replace the custom integration code.
  • Use heuristics to deduce the frame structure for resources being loaded, this is necessary for domain-based whitelisting and Acceptable Ads, among others.
  • Implement Acceptable Ads, which can now work reliably.

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Forward compatibility of filters [Done] · 2013-02-04 09:31 by Wladimir Palant

Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.

Current state

A small number of our users stays on outdated Adblock Plus versions forever, e.g. 0.5% are still on Adblock Plus 0.7.* (mostly 0.7.5.5). There are similar numbers for Adblock Plus 1.3.10 which is the last version that can be installed on PowerPC Macs by regular means. Outdated versions create issues for filter list authors who don’t want to cause breakage for these users and have to use backwards-compatible filters like foo$popup,image,~image instead of just foo$popup. This is largely because Adblock Pus simply ignores unknown filter options.

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Simplifying subscription downloads module [Done] · 2013-02-04 08:18 by Wladimir Palant

Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.

The module responsible for updating subscriptions is one of the most complicated components of Adblock Plus, also one that is notoriously complicated to test properly. Much of the code here is outdated for one reason or another.

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Improving subscriptions download infrastructure · 2013-01-17 14:18 by Wladimir Palant

As some people probably noticed, our roadmap page hasn’t been updated in a while. I originally used it to communicate what I am working on and what my priorities currently are — but one centralized roadmap simply doesn’t work any more with multiple people on the team working on various aspects of the project in parallel. So I want to try a different approach — have roadmaps for major changes that we are working on posted to the blog. You can see all of them by looking at the corresponding blog category and there is also a separate RSS feed for them. We will try to update the roadmaps to make sure it’s obvious what has been done already.

The batch of tasks here is about the subscriptions download infrastructure, the servers that EasyList and some other filter subscriptions are downloaded from.

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