Asynchronous file operations, end of support for old browsers · 2012-04-05 16:28 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0.4b.3443 reading and saving of patterns.ini and elemhide.css files will be asynchronous (meaning that they won’t delay other operations that Firefox or Adblock Plus might need to do). This approach has a bunch of advantages:
- Firefox startup and shutdown will be faster.
- Adblock Plus Preferences will be more responsive, changing something will no longer cause the browser to hang for a split second.
- The inherently unreliable cache.js file is no longer necessary and will not be used.
There are also some drawbacks which is why it took so long to make this decision:
- First browser window might appear before Adblock Plus managed to read its filters. If that happens, the web pages from the restored session (or the homepage) might have ads. This never happened in my testing but it is possible.
- patterns.ini is no longer saved on browser shutdown, some hit count information might get lost because of that (up to 250 hits).
Known issues (should be fixed soon):
- When updating from an earlier Adblock Plus version, the first-run page might open. Your settings will not be changed.
- Writing elemhide.css might fail in some rare scenarios.
In other news, support for anything before Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8 and SeaMonkey 2.5 has been dropped. I started cleaning up our code using the new platform capabilities and will continue doing so. Also, a work-around for the subscription download issue in Firefox 14 has been implemented.
Upcoming and past changes to application compatibility · 2012-03-16 08:02 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.
On the pop-up blocker in Adblock Plus · 2012-02-15 18:33 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.
The future of Element Hiding Helper · 2012-01-19 12:08 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.
Adblock Plus 2.0.3 released · 2012-01-05 09:54 by Wladimir Palant
- Added a way to disable automatic filter subscription updates by means of a hidden preference.
- Fixed: Blocking from context menu sometimes doesn’t work if the context menu has a submenu.
- Fixed: Tabs on Flash and Java sometimes disappear before they can be clicked.
- Filter Preferences: Fixed the default width of the “Enabled” column.
- Blockable items: Fixed “Disable filter on site” feature.
Adblock Plus 2.0.2 released · 2011-12-21 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
- Improved texts describing “non-intrusive ads” feature.
- Made toolbar icon properly customizable in Thunderbird.
- Fixed: Filter editing is broken in Firefox 3.6.
- Firefox Mobile: Fixed user interface to handle “non-intrusive ads” feature properly.
Adblock Plus 2.0.1 released · 2011-12-14 11:57 by Wladimir Palant
This release is fixing a few minor issues compared to Adblock Plus 2.0. Main reason for the release is a change to the compatibility information.
Adblock Plus 2.0 released · 2011-12-13 16:59 by Wladimir Palant
Major changes
- Experimental pop-up blocking support for the cases where the built-in pop-up blocker fails.
- New Filter Preferences dialog makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
- Custom filters can be organized into any number of filter groups.
- Backup and Restore functionality allows creating a copy of all filter preferences, not just custom filters.
- Added “Allow non-intrusive advertising” setting (can be changed in Filter Preferences, documentation).
Please welcome our first employee: Andrey Novikov · 2011-12-09 21:11 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I explained why we changed our policy on donations. This worked out and we were able to hire our first employee: Andrey Novikov. Andrey comes from a web development and server administration background, he is also the developer of the Androzic app for Android-based mobile phones. For now he is working on Adblock Plus for Chrome and already added proper recognition of third-party domains (something that only few people will notice but nevertheless important to bring our Chrome extension on par with the Firefox version). Next task on his list: porting user interface from Adblock Plus for Firefox to Chrome.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 4] · 2011-12-09 15:58 by Wladimir Palant
The previous part analyzed the last page of the survey where people replied on the role of Adblock Plus on the web. Of course, it would also be interesting to see whether the results are different depending on which group of survey respondents you look. I analyzed the last page for each of the survey languages separately and I’ve also created a separate analysis for “newbies” — people who said that they were using Firefox for less than one year. I’ll just publish the results here without commenting.