Dear authors of ad blocking software · 4 hours ago by Wladimir Palant
I know that there is lots of different ad blocking software out there, for browsers other than Firefox or even independent of any browser. Some of these programs can use the same filter subscriptions that Adblock Plus offers, and some even use EasyList and/or other Adblock Plus subscriptions by default. And I don’t see a problem with that — as long as they do it in a nice way. However, I do have a problem when bugs in those ad blocking solutions overload my server.
Web pages accessing chrome:// is forbidden · 26 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I didn’t believe that this would still be fixed in Firefox 3 but bug 292789 has landed. The timing could be better, having such a big change go in shortly before a release is certainly less than optimal — yet still, I think that we are much better off now than we were before.
Status update on adblockplus.org · 37 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, one of the scripts used by adblockplus.org was putting considerable load on the server (actually tiny load but it was invoked every time somebody downloaded EasyList). Unfortunately, the provider didn’t communicate that to me so that I didn’t know of any load issues until the server got overloaded yesterday and the provider disabled adblockplus.org. The problem is now fixed and the server load is acceptable again. However, I will probably still have to move to a different server — NetDepot isn’t comfortable sponsoring hosting for a project of this size.
Shortcut keys are hard · 47 days ago by Wladimir Palant
When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.
What software update isn't · 47 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Having read John Lilly’s post on Apple’s software update I think I’ll stay away from Apple’s software in future. Commenters confirm that iTunes offering Safari as a “software update” is not an exception, it rather has been a company policy to push unrelated products in software updates — e.g. QuickTime updates offer you to install iTunes as well. And I agree, this is very, very wrong. I expect software update to keep my computer safe and up-to-date, not sneak some crap onto it I don’t need. I am already extremely annoyed by Windows Update nagging me about Microsoft’s malware removal tool each month even if I don’t have it installed. Now Apple is doing the same thing, and I don’t think it is funny.
Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 53 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.
TomTom HOME and add-ons · 53 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I have been writing very little about what I am doing in my day job, maybe it is time to change this. As some might know, I am a developer in the team behind TomTom HOME, an application that allows users to manage their TomTom navigator devices (e.g. installing new content on them, sharing it with other users or doing backups).
Great Java news · 74 days ago by Wladimir Palant
It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.
Statistics, statistics, statistics · 80 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Of course, we all knew that Addons.Mozilla.Org was sitting on a huge pile of statistically usable data. But honestly, I never really believed we would ever see a significant amount of it. Do you remember that server that would pull publicly accessible extension download counts from AMOv2 every day and display the data in graphs? I missed that one a lot now that the download counts are considered private.
Releases now tagged in CVS · 88 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, some people want Adblock Plus releases to be clearly marked in CVS. So I tagged all past releases of Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper — future releases should be tagged automatically. So, if you want to know what the source code looked like when Adblock Plus 0.7.2 was released, here it is.