Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Forward compatibility of filters · 2013-02-04 09:31 by Wladimir Palant

Current state

A small number of our users stays on outdated Adblock Plus versions forever, e.g. 0.5% are still on Adblock Plus 0.7.* (mostly 0.7.5.5). There are similar numbers for Adblock Plus 1.3.10 which is the last version that can be installed on PowerPC Macs by regular means. Outdated versions create issues for filter list authors who don’t want to cause breakage for these users and have to use backwards-compatible filters like foo$popup,image,~image instead of just foo$popup. This is largely because Adblock Pus simply ignores unknown filter options.

Simplifying subscription downloads module · 2013-02-04 08:18 by Wladimir Palant

The module responsible for updating subscriptions is one of the most complicated components of Adblock Plus, also one that is notoriously complicated to test properly. Much of the code here is outdated for one reason or another.

Improving subscriptions download infrastructure · 2013-01-17 14:18 by Wladimir Palant

As some people probably noticed, our roadmap page hasn’t been updated in a while. I originally used it to communicate what I am working on and what my priorities currently are — but one centralized roadmap simply doesn’t work any more with multiple people on the team working on various aspects of the project in parallel. So I want to try a different approach — have roadmaps for major changes that we are working on posted to the blog. You can see all of them by looking at the corresponding blog category and there is also a separate RSS feed for them. We will try to update the roadmaps to make sure it’s obvious what has been done already.

The batch of tasks here is about the subscriptions download infrastructure, the servers that EasyList and some other filter subscriptions are downloaded from.