MAOW presentation slides · 2008-09-22 08:47 by Wladimir Palant
I was invited to give a talk at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris this weekend so I tried to give people an idea what it takes to maintain an extension project that already got rolling. The presentation went fairly well even though I could have told much more and I had to scrap the slide on security because the time has simply run out. My slides can be viewed here (note that FullerScreen extension messes the slides up badly, as we discovered just before the presentation).
Creating quality software · 2008-09-13 13:56 by Wladimir Palant
It got quiet around Adblock Plus again after some great strides towards Adblock Plus 0.8. That doesn’t mean however that nothing is happening, on the contrary. However, when I was about to add another small user interface change (one of the few that are still due for 0.8 release), I noticed that this is way more complicated than it should be. Why?
Filtering HTML code in Adblock Plus · 2008-09-11 16:54 by Wladimir Palant
Henrik Gemal blogged about a new feature in Firefox, extensions can now inspect and modify the response of HTTP requests before it gets to the sender. And the best news is, it is coming to Firefox 3.0.3 as well, so extension developers don’t need to wait a year before this feature can be used. Obviously, Firebug and Firekeeper developers want this — the former to display the response, the latter to prevent a malicious response from ever reaching the sender. However, it could be useful for Adblock Plus as well.
Don't bother reporting your plugin issues to me · 2008-08-27 10:18 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus is based on content policies, and content policies don’t get along with plugins too well — so I am used to dealing with plugin issues that are regularly reported as bugs in Adblock Plus. Typically, in those cases I try to reproduce the issue, create minimized testcases and report the problem at bugzilla.mozilla.org (if there is no such report already of course). Finding the actual source of the problem and fixing it would require more time than I can spend but thanks to Boris Zbarsky and Johnny Stenback this still didn’t work out too bad, all the issues I am aware of have been fixed in Firefox 3.
Blocking malicious sites with Adblock Plus · 2008-07-03 09:48 by Wladimir Palant
I was reading about yet another wave of attacks exploiting a Flash vulnerability. It turned out that the Flash vulnerability used was already fixed but that doesn’t really matter — Adobe seems incapable of updating users to a secure Flash version in a timely fashion. So Firefox users were at risk here as well, and the continuing waves of SQL Injection attacks inserting malicious iframes into trusted websites didn’t exactly make the situation better.
Users with add-ons much more likely to upgrade? · 2008-07-02 12:00 by Wladimir Palant
Henrik Gemal posted on current Firefox market share. Apparently, current Net Applications figures say that only 24% of all Firefox users already switched to Firefox 3. Interestingly, the percentage amongst Adblock Plus users seems much higher. The numbers on addons.mozilla.org indicate 43% Firefox 3 users. This is confirmed by the numbers from popular filter subscriptions, e.g. 43% of EasyList users (largely US-based) and more than 45% of “Cedrics Liste” users (mostly German) are already using Firefox 3.
Yes, that's how you do it · 2008-06-20 16:28 by Wladimir Palant
Just read this article on The Daily WTF. Yes, that’s how you do it if you care about your readers and their impression of your site. I am not usually blocking Google Ads but I had to add a filter specifically for The Daily WTF to block Google’s image ads. I guess I can take that filter out again. Now if they would only get rid of animated ads altogether, I would disable Adblock Plus on that site.
Dear authors of ad blocking software · 2008-05-09 10:56 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.
Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon take 2 · 2008-04-15 21:27 by Wladimir Palant
Original Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon release had a flaw that prevented the list of blockable items from working correctly. This issue has now been fixed, only the K-Meleon compatibility layer has changed without any changes to the actual Adblock Plus extension.
Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 released · 2008-04-09 19:15 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Locales added: Hebrew, Malay
- Improved Firefox 3 compatibility
- Changed default keyboard shortcuts to Ctrl+Shift+E (preferences) and Ctrl+Shift+V (blockable items)
- Removed “Check banner links” option