Preventing background tabs from wasting your computer's resources · 4 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Taras recently blogged on how websites manage to ruin Firefox performance by continuing to do something even though their tab is no longer active — they keep updating the view that you cannot see. He wondered whether it would be possible to suspend these tabs from an extension. I looked into this and there is a way to suspend all timeouts for a tab — something that an extension could use. Getting the details right wasn’t quite trivial but I think that my extension gets it right now: Suspend background tabs. Enjoy!
Using asynchronous file I/O in Gecko · 41 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I’ve finally decided to start using asynchronous file I/O in Adblock Plus (probably about time). I didn’t expect this to be too complicated, mostly messy because of all the callbacks. Well, I was mistaken. I will write down what I figured out, this might help somebody.
Upcoming and past changes to application compatibility · 62 days ago by Wladimir Palant
Starting with version 2.0 Adblock Plus requires at least Firefox 3.6.13 to be installed (or Thunderbird 3.1.7 or SeaMonkey 2.1). We really don’t support earlier Firefox 3.6 versions because of a critical bug that will cause Flash to break. Unfortunately, this limitation initially couldn’t be enforced by technical means (due to a limitation on addons.mozilla.org) so some people with old Firefox 3.6 versions nevertheless got it installed. If you are one of them: you should update your browser as soon as possible, already because of the numerous known security issues in the old versions.
Random thoughts on democracy and Russian presidential election · 65 days ago by Wladimir Palant
As some of you might know, Russia sort of elected a new old president a week ago. After taking a 4 years break as prime minister Putin now becomes Russian president for the third time. I’ve been following the Russian-language reactions to the election which I find quite interesting. While I like most readers of this blog have the luxury of living in a democracy, sometimes I need a reminder about what actually constitutes a democracy. Hint: elections in regular intervals are not sufficient.
On the pop-up blocker in Adblock Plus · 91 days ago by Wladimir Palant
There is a semi-hidden new feature in Adblock Plus 2.0: a pop-up blocker. I wanted to explain what this feature is about and why there are no big announcements about it.
We are back · 97 days ago by Wladimir Palant
As you probably noticed, the distribution update yesterday didn’t go as planned. For some reason, the new operating system confused the virtual server manager enough that it refused to start the server again. And since that issue couldn’t be resolved on our side fixing it took a while. Now the system has been restored from backup, I then applied my personal backup (because the hosting provider could only restore an old backup for reasons I’m unable to understand) and now we are only missing a few days worth of issue reports and probably a few forum posts from yesterday’s morning (roughly one hour between my backup and the start of the downtime).
Possible downtime on Wednesday · 100 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I will try to update the Linux distribution on adblockplus.org tomorrow (Wednesday), starting at around 8 AM CET. With some luck the server will only go down for a few seconds for a reboot. Obviously, there is some risk of an extended downtime but I hope that this time the backups will allow restoring service soon if something goes wrong. easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org (filter list downloads) will not be affected but everything else on the adblockplus.org domain (including EasyList homepage) will be.
The future of Element Hiding Helper · 119 days ago by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus roadmap currently has a bullet point “Integrate Element Hiding Helper into Adblock Plus”. After adding Page Inspector support to Element Hiding Helper today I think that I’m confident about what exactly will be integrated there.
Faster extension development cycle: install changes automatically · 124 days ago by Wladimir Palant
The usual extension development cycle is less than optimal: change something, create a new extension build, install it in the browser (gonna love warnings), restart the browser, finally test it. I don’t like repeating this cycle all the time and so in the past years I’ve been using a test environment in which most extension files are loaded directly from my source code checkout (thanks to a manipulated chrome.manifest file). With this test environment many changes could be tested by simply reopening the extension window, for others you would restart the browser.
Raymond Chen quote of the day · 132 days ago by Wladimir Palant
I regularly use a program that doesn’t follow this rule. The program allocates a lot of memory during the course of its life, and when I exit the program, it just sits there for several minutes, sometimes spinning at 100% CPU, sometimes churning the hard drive (sometimes both). When I break in with the debugger to see what’s going on, I discover that the program isn’t doing anything productive. It’s just methodically freeing every last byte of memory it had allocated during its lifetime.