Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Moved blockable items list to the bottom of the window · 2007-02-06 01:06 by Wladimir Palant

A new Adblock Plus 0.7.2.4+ development build (2007020523) has been uploaded.

Installation

https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/

Changes

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)
Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items
Added hit counts for element hiding rules
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)
Replaced icons in the sidebar’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 sidebar and 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
Dropped Songbird 0.1 support, requiring Songbird 0.2 or higher now

Known issues

~~Blockable items: “Open in new tab” and “Add exception rule for item” context menu items should be disabled for element hiding entries~~
~~Blockable items: “Address” line in the tooltip is redundant for element hiding entries~~

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [11]

rick752 · 2007-02-06 06:29 · #

Wow. For the first time, I’ve actually re-attached it. :-)
IceDogg · 2007-02-06 06:51 · #

Same here Rick. I had resized and made it close to what it is by default now. Nice touch!
adum · 2007-02-06 15:57 · #

Really this location of the list of blockable items is wonderful. Why did nobody think about it before? Now it seems so obvious …

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

Oh, people did think about this before but creating new user interface paradigms generally isn’t a good approach. Reusing the existing sidebar seemed to be better than fighting themes and extensions that don’t expect anything below the browser window. Note also that the list of blockable items started out as a Firefox-only feature, and that’s really the only application implementing a proper sidebar (SeaMonkey’s sidebar implementation is awful). Fortunately I was now able to place blockable items at the bottom in a way that is unlikely to break something (I copied some things from Firebug for this) but I am still not sure we won’t hit any problems.
Fox · 2007-02-08 16:49 · #

“Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items”

Would it be good or bad idea if their text color is blue, like in Preferences -window.
There is that Type: “hidden”, but i think it would be good if their color is blue, because those are just hidden. Red is more blocked color.
But i don’t know if we then also need a new “State” icon for them, maybe not.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

I think this is rather a bad idea. Red shows clearly that Adblock Plus did something on the page. Blue doesn’t bring up any immediate associations which defeats the main purpose of this listing – namely to show users who don’t know about element hiding that the page has been changed.
Fox · 2007-02-08 17:29 · #

Ok, i also now think that it’s a bad idea:)
Fox · 2007-02-19 20:16 · #

This: # Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items
And Hit counter does not work here:
http://nyt.hs.fi/
When i hide that blank top area with:
nyt.hs.fi#TD(bgcolor=#999999)(align=left)

And
http://telkku.fi
when i hide those Ferratum text ads:
telkku.fi#TR(class=tekstimainokset)

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

Thanks for finding this. It seems that the -moz-binding CSS attribute used for hit counters doesn’t work for TR and TD elements. I will see if I can find the reason, it might be a Gecko bug.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

Ok, so this is bug 83830. I found a work-around so that this issue should be fixed in the next development build.
Fox · 2007-02-19 20:20 · #

It seems that sometimes those works at telkku.fi
AYBABTU · 2007-03-07 19:31 · #

http://wws.somesite.com/*/#adBox

could block the element #adBox… or hide it…?
Larsp · 2007-03-11 19:05 · #

Is it possible to change the color of blocked items (red) to another color? About 8% of all men are red/green colorblind and I personally find it hard to distinguish the red lines from the black.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

This problem has been already discussed in the forum (http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7666). General recommendation is to add the “State” column – click the symbol to the right of the column headers and select “State” from the menu. This will make it easier to recognize what has been blocked (and the development builds http://adblockplus.org/development-builds/ have a better icon now). But you can still change the color of course, e.g. with the Stylish extension. Ask me if you prefer to do this, I will give you the CSS code for this.
Lars Pehrsson · 2007-03-11 23:17 · #

Hi Wladimir. Thanks for a quick reply. The state button helped. I will look forward for the new release.
holy · 2007-04-21 13:43 · #

I think that each user should be able to choose which way he wants it. I for my part preferred it in the side bar and I think people using wide screen monitors, which are getting more and more popular, are also not happy with this solution.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

See my response here: http://adblockplus.org/releases/adblock-plus-075-released#c000493

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