Status Update: 2010-08-27 · 3 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Finished redesigning the way Adblock Plus stores its data, now following the minimalistic approach to get the best performance and minimal memory use. The usability of blockable items list suffered somewhat but seems to be acceptable so far.
- Improved subscription downloads, especially to ensure better distribution over the week. Also some detail improvements and better/more unit tests.
- One more trivial Firefox 4 fix due to changes in bug 383930. The issue is a minor annoyance when dealing with submenus of the context menu.
- Set up a blog for EasyList, Zine turned out to be the best option after all, despite its development being seemingly stale. This blog will eventually be migrated to Zine as well, shouldn’t be too complicated.
New way to store data · 7 days ago by Wladimir Palant
The new development build (1.3a.20100826) has gone through some major rearchitecturing, the way it stores data changed radically. The purpose of this change is to improve performance and memory use: Adblock Plus no longer stores more data than necessary and will do only as little bookkeeping as absolutely necessary. The areas affected by this change are:
- List of blockable items (will no longer show all data immediately when opened, instead it will take a few seconds to fetch the data)
- Toolbar icon tooltip (now counts the actual hits so that the number might be higher than what you see in the list of blockable items)
- Filter composer dialog (adding a filter will no longer re-apply filters to all of the current window, only to the element you opened the composer for)
- Context menu (behavior should be unchanged except for a recent regression fixed – handling of background images should be correct again)
- Tabs on Flash and Java (behavior should be unchanged)
- Blocking of redirects (I hope that the behavior is unchanged here)
I already noticed a side-effect: in Firefox 3.0/3.5 touching a node that is hidden causes element hiding rules to be reapplied. Since opening the list of blockable items touches nodes you might see hit count for element hiding rules go up when you do it. This issue is no longer present in Firefox 3.6.
Important changes coming to the Adblock Plus project · 11 days ago by Wladimir Palant
As I indicated before, there is much work to be done in the Adblock Plus project to keep it relevant. How are we coming along? Well, very slowly. The main problem remains my availability, too many of the tasks still hang on me. I tried delegating work, quite successfully in some areas, but that’s not enough — and moving some other areas out of my hands (like website localization or bug reports handling) requires some work on my part first. We are currently getting into the “interesting” phase with the Adblock Plus project where we actually get a chance to influence something and I think that moving faster is essential now.
Status Update: 2010-08-20 · 13 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I’ll try to publish these status updates at the end of each week — this is mainly a way for me to organize my work but it might also prove useful to somebody who wants to track Adblock Plus work. If you are annoyed by them — these will always appear in the “progress” category, many RSS feed readers allow filtering by post category. I’ll also explicitly not post these in the “adblock plus” category.
Done
- Fixed regressions introduced by Firefox 4 development
- Released Adblock Plus 1.2.2 from 1.2.x branch to allow using stable release with Firefox 4 betas/nightlies
- Mediated morphing of RuAdList into an EasyList supplement
Why app-global extensions are essentially broken · 15 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Should I rather title this blog post “App-global extensions considered harmful”? I hope not because I see some valid use cases for installing an extension in a central location where it will be taken over regardless of the profile used. However, the current implementation in XULRunner/Firefox has some very nasty side-effects which make using this mechanism a bad choice. And there are apparently many people making the same experience.
Adblock Plus 1.2.2 released · 15 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Note: The issue with transparent context menus in Firefox 4 Beta 3 hasn’t been entirely resolved, it still affects the context menu of the toolbar icon. If another 1.2.x release becomes necessary this issue will be addressed there, otherwise in Adblock Plus 1.3.
Changes
- Updates to support Firefox 4 nightly builds and Firefox 4 Beta 3
- Subscription dialog: Made “Add a different subscription” button less prominent
- Subscription dialog: Fixed bad Chinese translation for the “Add a different subscription” button
How about making extension compatibility updates less annoying? · 18 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I came back from a vacation today and found around 20 mails in my inbox along the lines of “When will Adblock Plus be compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3?” There are probably a dozen more questions in the forum which I didn’t check yet. Now I know of course that Adblock Plus is compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 because lots of people (yours truly included) regularly use Adblock Plus in nightly builds. So all I had to do was to log into AMO and change the compatibility info for Adblock Plus.
How do users end up with a misconfigured certificate store? · 37 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I am out of ideas so maybe somebody knows more than me here. I noticed that some Adblock Plus users cannot download https://easylist.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. Data from a different filter list which switched to HTTPS recently indicates that most of these clients cannot establish an HTTPS connection — most likely the certificate is rejected. I did a very rough estimate, we are talking about something like 0.3% of all Adblock Plus users. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but turns into tens of thousands users in absolute numbers.
Why I had to ban China - fighting spam · 38 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I want to start with an apology to the few Chinese who are using this website for legitimate purposes — next time they try to post on the forum or comment on my blog they will most likely see an error page. Which is really a pity and I feel bad about that. But I cannot really see another way.
XULRunner in large projects, part 4: Localization pitfalls · 48 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I am back from the Mozilla Summit and somewhat managed to process all the new information I got there. But instead of posting yet another summit summary or more summit photos (what, you didn’t know how great this summit was?) I have a far more boring topic for today: localization of XULRunner-based applications.