Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Added support for permanent redirects · 2007-04-18 06:38 by Wladimir Palant

A new Adblock Plus 0.7.2.4+ development build (2007041804) has been uploaded. This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 0.7.5.

Installation

https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/

Changes

• Added locales: Arabic, Frisian, Mongolian
• List of blockable items now appears at the bottom of the window instead of being placed in the sidebar, the behavior has been made consistent throughout host applications — with exception of K-Meleon that still supports only the detached state (forum thread)
• Removed SeaMonkey sidebar customization hack
• Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items
• Added hit counts for element hiding rules
• More consistent handling of frames, less likely to trigger bugs in Gecko (side effect: frame’s URL no longer disappers from the list of blockable items when frame’s location changes)
• Changed appearance of object tabs to make them less intrusive (forum thread)
• Added collapse and ~collapse filter options to override the global “Collapse blocked elements” option (the filter */banners/*$collapse will always collapse elements, */banners/*$~collapse will never collapse)
• Subscription address is now changed if download results in a permanent HTTP redirect
• Next download for subscriptions containing comment with text “Redirect: http://example.com/new.address” will happen from the new address, subscription address is changed if this download is successful
• After 30 failed subscription download attempts the default fallback address is requested for information on new subscription address (extensions.adblockplus.subscriptions_fallbackurl and extensions.adblockplus.subscriptions_fallbackerrors preferences added)
• Replaced icons in the blockable item’s “State” column to make them better recognizable by colorblind people (opinions are welcome)
• Removed useless “Block remote ads in local pages” option together with the corresponding extensions.adblockplus.blocklocalpages preference (forum thread)
• Removed extensions.adblockplus.localschemes preference (generally blocking on all content pages now)
• Removed “Not a remote page” message in the list of blockable items and the preferences dialog to be more consistent
• No longer filling the list with default filters when patterns.ini doesn’t exist, offering subscriptions should be enough (extensions.adblockplus.patterns preference removed)
• Removed extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblockprefs and extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblocksync preferences (Adblock’s preferences are now only imported when patterns.ini doesn’t exist yet)
• Removed extensions.adblockplus.grouporder preference (hardcoded now, no point in having this as a preference)
• Removed extensions.adblockplus.linktypes preference (using a more general approach to recognize nodes that can have links)
• Removed extensions.adblockplus.blocktypes preference (rules like *$stylesheet can be used to prevent a particular type from being blocked)
• Removed mostly useless extensions.adblockplus.noncollapsabletypes preference
• Removed exceptions for about:blank
• Now ignoring effectively empty rows/cols attributes when collapsing frames in a frameset
• Fixed: items with same address but different type always appear as one item in the list
• Fixed: “Open in new tab” and “Flash item’s borders” context menu entries (blockable items list) don’t work in Thunderbird and Songbird
• Fixed: EMBED elements containing images should be recognized as objects
• Fixed: Object tabs require two restarts after installation to work correctly in Firefox 3.0 alphas (bug 16077)
• Made compatible with K-Meleon 1.1, multi-language packages can be built now (those will not work correctly in K-Meleon 1.02)
• Dropped Songbird 0.1 support, requiring Songbird 0.2 or higher now

Known issues

• Header of the blockable items list not visible in fullscreen mode
• Object subrequests in Firefox 2.0.0.4 and higher displayed with type “object”

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [5]

1. chewey · 2007-04-18 06:59 · #

   You implement faster than I am able to suggest :-)

   The ability to trigger redirects via a “magic string” in comments is a great idea for those without full access to their .htaccess (like me).

   Thanks.

2. LorenzoC · 2007-04-19 01:45 · #

   Hello, I’ve got a problem, maybe you already know it.

   In the FF error console:
   Error: urchinTracker is not defined

   It refers to the Google Analytics JS:
   [cannot post the JS code]
   urchinTracker();

   I don’t know, maybe it is also related to the subscriptions, I’ve subscribed the basic list and the tracking list from Easylist.

   Regards.

3. LorenzoC · 2007-04-19 01:56 · #

   Addendum: the problem goes away as soon as I unsubscribe the tracking list from Easylist.
   Simply disabling the analytics “rule” in that list doesn’t change anything.

4. Fox · 2007-04-19 02:15 · #

   /urchin.js|
   rule also needs to be disabled.

   If that Google Analytics JavaScript -file is blocked,
   you see that error in error console, because that site still has internal JavaScript part that is executed, (You can view html source and see it.)

   ps: i use this:
   google-analytics.com/$image

   Because Convert things do not work here if Google Analytics js file is blocked.
   http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/length

   And Dilbert.com link does not work here: http://www.comics.com/

5. LorenzoC · 2007-04-19 11:15 · #

   Yes, sorry for rising the alert, now I understand it better.
   Actually you should disable ADBlock whenever you are debugging scripts in a webpage. It is not a bug, it is simply the way things work. Problem is the filter stops the JS from loading, then in the page there is a call to a function inside the missing JS and you get the error. It is not Analytics only of course. I guess to fix this you should re-write the page code to remove also all the calls to the stopped JS files.
   Regards.

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