How do users end up with a misconfigured certificate store? · 2010-07-27 14:18 by Wladimir Palant
I am out of ideas so maybe somebody knows more than me here. I noticed that some Adblock Plus users cannot download https://easylist.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. Data from a different filter list which switched to HTTPS recently indicates that most of these clients cannot establish an HTTPS connection — most likely the certificate is rejected. I did a very rough estimate, we are talking about something like 0.3% of all Adblock Plus users. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but turns into tens of thousands users in absolute numbers.
Yes, Adblock Plus is broken in the current Minefield · 2010-07-02 14:04 by Wladimir Palant
I expect lots of reports on this issue so I better publish an explanation before that happens. Yes, starting with Minefield build 20100702 Adblock Plus won’t work any more — neither the stable version nor the development builds. This is due to huge changes in the Gecko platform which were announced a few weeks ago.
JavaScript modules in a JAR file - finally! · 2010-06-18 07:45 by Wladimir Palant
I don’t know why nobody announced this yet, a very important change landed on mozilla-central a few days ago. JavaScript modules can now be located in JAR files and loaded directly via chrome:// URLs. So an extension can now keep its modules in the JAR file along with all the other code.
NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED status in nsIHttpChannel · 2010-03-19 07:17 by Wladimir Palant
Dear Lazyweb! Do you have any idea why XMLHttpRequest might fail with channel.status being NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED? This seems to be happening consistently for some Adblock Plus users when downloading https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. This issue is happening on all platforms and across all supported Firefox versions (I see 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 in the logs).
Getting screen coordinates for an HTML element · 2010-01-31 00:27 by Wladimir Palant
Yes, getBoxObjectFor() is deprecated, we all know that. And there is getBoundingClientRect() now which is much better anyway. But what should I do if I need the screen coordinates of an HTML element? getBoundingClientRect() won’t provide them and translating doesn’t seem possible (window.screenX is not the screen position of the window’s client area). Google found only a newsgroup discussion yet I already knew that popups can be positioned relative to a node automatically. I need to update the position of a popup that is already open and there doesn’t seem a way to realign the popup with its anchor node without closing it (at least not in Firefox 3.5).
Trying to get rid of "Author not verified" (or: Signing extensions with StartCom certificate) · 2009-07-07 18:47 by Wladimir Palant
Over the past few days I tried to get Adblock Plus builds signed and gave up again. Given that there is fairly little documentation on that topic, I though I would summarize my experience.
Different ways to force garbage collection · 2008-11-20 10:49 by Wladimir Palant
Yesterday I reported a Gecko bug where reproducing required the garbage collector to run. In the following discussion this useful snippet of code appeared:
window.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
.getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDOMWindowUtils)
.garbageCollect();
Making modal dialogs work on Mac OS X · 2008-09-15 19:49 by Wladimir Palant
If you ever tried TomTom HOME, you probably noticed that its user interface is “unusual”. It tries to mimic the user interface of a navigation device meaning among others that all messages (“dialogs”) replace the entire window content and require you to dismiss them before you can continue doing whatever you have been doing. There are some advantages to that kind of user interface but it was also a constant source of irritation among our testers (and, no doubt, users). In particular, you could still use the menu despite the dialog, with strange results.
Filtering HTML code in Adblock Plus · 2008-09-11 15:54 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.
Web pages accessing chrome:// is forbidden · 2008-04-13 19:30 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.