DownThemAll: Latest News

Giorgio Maone, the author of NoScript, recently released an update that actively and intensionally crippled Adblock Plus.
The piece of code responsible was reportedly obfuscated to make it hard to find and analyze.
Read the post of Wladmir Palant, the author of Adblock Plus, and what Giorgio has to say.

Giorgio later reverted these changes (under pressure it seems), but started to forcefully add a filter subscription to white-list his domains, without asking for user consent, of course.
The latest release at least lets the user “opt-out”.

Frankly, I find both, first the intensional crippling of Adblock Plus, and then adding some filter subscription without consent, disturbing and unacceptable.

I’d expect Giorgio to stop defending his previous actions and instead admitting his wrong-doing and issuing a public apology to the users.

Nils

Update, 2nd of May:

From the NoScript FAQ

Version 1.9.2.6 (released May the 1st 2009) automatically and permanently removes the filter on startup, no questions asked. This decision has been taken as a sign of good will and apologizes, after the lack of a prompt asking beforehand prior version 1.9.2.5 caused complaints and controversy in the Mozilla community.

So the filter subscription is gone again, and there is kind of an apology.
However it still feels, after reading this, that Giorgio didn’t get the point, exactly.
Why didn’t he address the initial “patching” of Adblock Plus code?
Is it just because of the complaints and “controversy” that he reverted the changes again, or does he now see how he betrayed user trust?

I don’t have any problem with NoScript adding a filter subscription, as long as it is in a transparent manner and the user can properly opt-out, far better even has to opt-in.
A lot of other users seem to agree. If there was some choice along the lines of “Want to support NoScript by allowing to displayed Noscript website ads in Adblock Plus” (Yes/No), a lot of users would have chosen yes.

Update2, 2nd of May:
Seems Giorgio indeed got the point. See this forum post.
Still makes me wonder how it can happen that a “security” software developer implements and releases code that easily can be classified as “malware”…

AntiContainer is an extension and framework to DownThemAll! which allows the user to download resources that are normally hidden behind container pages.

For example it is possible to download images directly from those one-click image hosters, provided an appropriate plugin exists.

Version 0.6., which I just released, includes an easy way for plugin authors to share their plugins and users to install those plugins, either from file or directly from the web.

Check out the AntiContainer page for the download and more information.
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AntiContainer is an extension and framework to DownThemAll! which allows the user to download resources that are normally hidden behind container pages.

For instance almost all so called “one-click” image hosters, such as imagevenue, use such container pages. AntiContainer enables DownThemAll! to download the actual images there instead of just the page.

Hence it is now possible to use DownThemAll! to mass-download from image hosters and other services.
Currently there are 38 plugins, including one for blogger.com images and others for the most common image hosters.

For the download and more information about usage and writing plugins yourself see the AntiContainer page.

The current version is still a test release. So please test a lot and give feedback if anything doesn’t work or is missing.

We’re proud to release DownThemAll! 1.1.
A lot of new features have been added and a lot of new major and minor fixes were made.

Read our Release Notes for more information.
Downloads are available from addons.mozilla.org or our local mirror.

The team wishes all of our contributors, translators and users a Happy New Year 2009.

We’d like to ask the community to test drive the second and likely last Beta release of the next DownThemAll! version.
Please consider participating to help us deliver a rock stable final release version end of this year.

1. Make sure your application is supported.
   dTa 1.1 is compatible with mozilla 1.9.1 based applications, in particular Firefox 3 or later, Shredder (Thunderbird 3), Flock 2, Songbird 1.
2. Download and install 1.1 Beta2.
3. Test as much as possible and report any bugs.

Please see the preliminary change log for detailed information what changed.

This release already includes translations for:

• bg-BG
• de-DE
• el-GR
• en-US
• es-ES
• fr-FR
• mk-MK
• nl-NL
• pl-PL
• sk-SK
• vi-VN
• zh-CN

You may also help translating dTa to other languages. Just head over to Babelzilla where the translators community translates numerous extensions, not just dTa, discusses and organizes.

The final release is expected for the end of this year.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

We’d like to ask the community to test drive the first Beta release of the next DownThemAll! version.
Please consider participating to help us deliver a rock stable final release version end of this year.

1. Make sure your application is supported.
   dTa 1.1 is compatible with mozilla 1.9.1 based applications, in particular Firefox 3 or later, Shredder (Thunderbird 3), Flock 2, Songbird 1.
2. Download and install 1.1 Beta1.
3. Test as much as possible and report any bugs.

Beta 1 is en-US only. Please see the preliminary change log for detailed information what changed.

There will be a Beta 2 shortly afterwards addressing any issues remaining in this Beta and adding translations.
You may also help translating dTa to other languages. Just head over to Babelzilla where the translators community translates numerous extensions, not just dTa, discusses and organizes.

The final release is expected for the end of this year.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

The DownThemAll! team just released version 1.0.4, which is a bugfix version only.

Grab your copy over at addons.mozilla.org or use our local mirror.

Release notes are available, too.

Other than this stay tuned for the first Beta of dTa! 1.1, which will be released in the next few days.

Ladies and gentlemen,
the dTa Team just release version 1.0.1, the first bug correction release for the 1.0 series.

We corrected several bugs and regression that unfortunately went into 1.0.
Thanks for all the reports we received and that helped us improve dTa.

Read the Release Notes.