New way to store data · 2010-08-27 04:00 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.
Adblock Plus Watcher updated for Adblock Plus 1.3a and renamed · 2010-07-08 02:25 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus Watcher has been renamed into Diagnostics for Adblock Plus. Diagnostics 1.1.3a.20100708 restores compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a, it isn’t compatible to Adblock Plus 1.2 and below however. There are more changes coming, in particular better management of the dependency on Adblock Plus. But this version is usable again. Other changes:
- New extension icon, no longer reusing the icon from Adblock Plus
- Own About dialog, no longer opening the dialog from Adblock Plus
Compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a restored · 2010-05-20 04:00 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.1a.20100520 restores compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a, it isn’t compatible with Adblock Plus 1.2 and below however. Other changes:
- Dependency on Adblock Plus is managed “manually” now. This means that rather than becoming disabled in Add-on Manager without obvious reason Element Hiding Helper will now show a message suggesting to install/update/enable Adblock Plus and allowing to accomplish that with one click. Note: a message that a restart is necessary isn’t being displayed yet.
- Marked as compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2.
Changes to Adblock Plus extensibility mostly done · 2010-05-20 04:00 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with todays development build (1.3a.20100520) other extensions can extend Adblock Plus again. While details of the Adblock Plus API might change, the latest Element Hiding Helper development build (1.1a.20100520) should work well. Adblock Plus Watcher will be updated as well soon.
Other changes since Adblock Plus 1.2:
- Major architectural changes to allow Adblock Plus to install without restart in Firefox 4 — this work is mostly done but currently blocked on Firefox issues (especially bug 564667).
- Marked compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2
- Made sure image maps can be blocked via context menu (bug 16605).
- Fixed a long-standing bug: comments could be interpreted as element hiding rules (topic 5484).
- Removed code checking for Adblock and Filterset.G installations, both are pretty rare by now.
- Removed background images as a separate type, these are now reported with type “image” as well ($background option is equivalent to $image for reasons of backwards compatibility). Distinguishing background images and “regular” images was broken at least since Firefox 3.6.
New info page for development builds · 2010-05-06 07:52 by Wladimir Palant
Most people using development builds no longer update them manually, reading development build announcements isn’t absolutely necessary either. It was time to update the website to consider these changed circumstances — requiring people looking for a download link to open a blog post doesn’t make sense any more. Instead I created an info page that people are send to when they click on “development builds” link. I tried to keep it short yet still give all the important information (and yes, I still consider some information more important than the installation link which is why I put it first). Subscribing to the announcements is merely a recommendation now.
Incompatible changes in current builds · 2010-05-02 08:38 by Wladimir Palant
As some already noticed, the current development builds (starting with 1.2.0+.2010050102) no longer work with extensions relying on Adblock Plus such as Element Hiding Helper or Filter Uploader. I should have announced this in advance, sorry about forgetting that. Right now is the rare occasion when Adblock Plus has to break compatibility with such extensions (last time was Adblock Plus 0.7.5.2).
Second Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-22 04:00 by Wladimir Palant
The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010042202) is the second release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. The scheduled release date is April 30th.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Updated translations: 27 locales are done, two more are complete but being tested
- Opening a new tab from the list of blockable items respects browser preferences, esp. with regards to opening in background (bug 22722)
- Fixed some cases where opening tabs from Adblock Plus in Thunderbird/SeaMonkey would trigger the default browser unnecessarily
- Improved Fennec (Firefox Mobile) integration, using the site menu in Fennec 1.1 to display Adblock Plus status
- Thunderbird: moved Adblock Plus toolbar icon to the message header which is a better place for it
- A bunch of minor tweaks around toolbar icon in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
- Added $elemhide option for exception rules to disable element hiding on a page, unlike $document this option doesn’t affect frames embedded in a page or items matching blocking rules (forum topic)
First Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-14 04:00 by Wladimir Palant
The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010041402) is the first release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. All features on the roadmap have been implemented and I am starting the final translation stage.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Added Fanboy’s List as recommended filter subscription
- Subscription selection dialog: if multiple options are available for user’s locale one is selected randomly
- Filter composer: Added “block entire domain” as suggestion (forum topic)
- Firefox Mobile/Fennec: Added Adblock Plus status to site identity panel, clicking will disable/enable Adblock Plus on site
- Fixed: Subscription selection not always showing up on first start if previous browser session is restored
- Fixed: Toolbar icon not showing correctly with Songbird’s new default theme
Changes to the "Show tabs on Flash and Java" feature, second round · 2010-03-30 04:00 by Wladimir Palant
The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010033002) once again reworks “Show tabs on Flash and Java” feature. This should keep all of the advantages of the previous approach but make the issues (unreliable and ugly display on Linux, focus stealing, bad positioning) go away.
Major changes to the "Show tabs on Flash and Java" feature · 2010-02-03 03:39 by Wladimir Palant
The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010020302) brings major changes to the “Show tabs on Flash and Java” feature. While the tab displayed on Flash and Java content should mostly look the same as before, it is implemented in an entirely different way now.