RELEASE_NOTES.md

0.7.0 - 2022/04/04

Changes

• Blocking

  • Return an allowing filter, even if it isn't overriding a blocking filter. Issue #392

• Allow adding metadata to custom filters. Issue #407 and #419.

• Tooling for Manifest V3

  • Download filter list from subscriptions for DNR conversion. #412
  • Provide a tooling to merge subscriptions files. #394
  • Fetch full filter lists. #383
  • Filter list text to DNR conversion. #379

Bug fixes

Updating your code

• FilterStorage.addFilter() is now async and returns the Subscription object the filter was added to in case of success.
• Metadata for custom filter. Issue #407 and #419.
  • The new API FilterStrage.addFiltersWithMetadata() allow adding a bunch of custom filter with metadata. It is async and will return the created SpecialScubscription in case of success. Issue #407 and #419.
  • Added FilterStorage.getMetadataForFilter() and FilterStorage.setMetadataForFilter() to access metadata.
• Added FilterStorage.getSubscription() to get a subscription by URL.
• Changed FilterStorage.hasSubscription() to accept a URL in addition to the subscription itself.

0.6.0 - 2022/02/16

Changes

• Internal code changes

  • Revert knownFilters as non self-cleaning Map. Issue #371
  • Use native crypto API for sitekeys. Issue #208
  • Change linter rule to force space before curly braces. Issue #393

• API changes

  • Allow filters to be enabled / disabled per subscription. Issue #115

• Documentaion improvements

  • Document some of the preference keys. Issue #365
  • Add missing download status documentation (inline).
  • Minor documentation formatting improvements.

• Testing improvements

  • Add unit tests for iniParser. Issue #152
  • Fix some benchmark scripts that have been broken in a previous change.
  • Fix benchmarking code not running in some situations. MR !603
  • Fix downloading filter lists in benchmarks. Issue #376
  • Added time based benchmarking for filter matching. Issue #392
  • Require Node 16 for the test. Issue #374
  • Remove profiler option that doesn't exist anymore in Node 16. Issue #374
  • Update mocha to ^9.x and eslint to 3.72.
  • Ensure Regular Expression flags are preserved in parseScript.
  • Test against testpages in CI. Issue #398
  • Improve automated tests around filterListener with large tests sample. Issue #372
  • Improve reliability of ElemHideEmulation. Issue #384

• Filtering

  • Implement :not selector for ElemHideEmulation filters. Issue #369.

• Updated public suffix list. Issue #406

Bug fixes

• Identify more types of ElemenHiding filters which could be triggered by attribute changes. Issue #377
• Treat header and CSP separately from resource types. Issue #326

Updating your code

• Sitekey now use the webcrypto API. It's available in all support browsers, and in NodeJS 16. However if you use a different platform, you might need it add some polyfills.
• When calling Matcher.match or Matcher.search to check if any filters match a request in the context of header filtering or CSP filtering, the content type must now be the "context" type (contentTypes.HEADER or contentTypes.CSP) combined with the request resource type using the bitwise or operator.

0.5.1 - 2022/01/06

Bug fixes

• Fix a regression on loading stylesheet in the ElementHidingEmulation code. Issue #390

0.5.0 - 2021/10/07

Changes

• Internal code changes

  • All the scripts for building are in scripts and the content of build/assets has been moved to data/resources. FILTERS_SPEC.md is moved to docs. The destination of the documentation is now in build/docs. Issue #357
  • Update code style and linting: curly braces are now at the end of the line instead of on the next. Issue #311 eslint is now called with ecmaVersion set to 2018
  • Simplify the subclassing of ContentFilter.
  • Move all pattern matching logic to the patterns module. This wasn't a public API. Issue #79

• API changes

  • You can now use Prefs to set the parameters for the timing of the Synchronizer. Issue #138
  • Allow bypassing filter normalization. Issue #313
  • InvalidFilter now has the option property set for errors like "filter_unknown_option". Issue #305

• Documentaion improvements:

  • Various README update. Issue #337
  • Various jsdoc update to fix documentation not being generated.
  • Update jsdoc to 3.6.7.
  • Added documentation for the ElemHideEmulation class.
  • Added documentation to explain soft and hard expiration times in the Synchronizer class. Issue #58
  • Expand filter type documentation.

• Testing improvements:

  • Upgrade to geckodriver 2.0.4 for the test harness.
  • Expand test cases for the filter list header parsing.
  • Add more tests for lib/filterState.js. Issue #257
  • Benchmarking - add matching measurements. Issue #322. Issue #301
  • Describe our benchmarking options in package.json

• Snippet support:

  • Remove the machine learning code that was only use by the snippets library. Issue #321

• Changes for the webext-sdk

  • Changes notifications as suite for the webext-sdk. Issue #353 TBD document this better.
  • Add notifications.considerBlocked as an alias to Prefs["show_statsinpopup"]. Issue #334

• Filtering

  • :xpath is now allowed as extended syntax in the ElementHidingEmulation filters. Issue #308
  • :has() and :has-text() are aliases of :-abp-has() and :-abp-contains() respectively, for better compatibility with other ad blockers. Issue #229, #355
  • Escape multiple { and } in CSS rules for element hiding. Issue #331
  • Reject filters that are considered as too broad. Issue #264, #312, #370

• Misc performance changes

  • Avoid redundant option transformation
  • Simplify matching Regular Expression. Issue #319
  • Lower heap memory usage. Issue #310
  • Allow bypassing filter normalization. Issue #313
  • Discard InvalidFilter instances. Issue #338
  • Avoid duplicated static JSON data. Issue #318

• Build

  • Provide a minified core. Issue #306, #352

Bug fixes

• Avoid uppercasing sitekeys. Issue #303
• Fix various problems with elements that are hidden when they should no longer be. Issues #202, #339, #348.
• Fix a problem where an invalid CSS rule would disable all the element hiding. Issue #104
• Fix some timing issues with the engine initialization. Issue #344

Updating your code

Filter.normalize() now has an optional parameter to skip the heavy normailization. If you are adding already normalized filters, you can pass true to Fileter.normalize() to avoid doing most of the work. It's a bug to add a non normalized filter. See issue #313

Filter.fromText() return sometime an InvalidFilter when there is an error. Now if Filter.reason is "filter_unknown_option" may contain in Filter.option the name of the option that was not recognized. You can safely ignore it. See issue #305.

Also, Filter.fromText() is now more strict by rejecting filters that would be deemed too broad. In these cases it returns InvalidFilter with a Filter.reason set to "filter_url_not_specific_enough" if the pattern is 3 characters or less, or "filter_elemhide_not_specific_enough" for a generic element hiding filter whose body (CSS selector) is 2 characters or less. See issue #264. However a wildcard * in a URL filter allow short filters to still be valid. See issue #370.

When instanciating ElemHideEmulation, you can now pass as the second parameter of the constructor, a callback to unhide, function that would be called to unhide elements previously hidden (doing the opposite of the hide callback). See issue #202.

If you were adding lib/ml.js to your code you shall change the path to grab the file from the snippet library.

To use the new parameters for the Synchronizer, set the following values in your Prefs object:

• subscriptions_check_interval how long the recheck for a list in case of error, in milliseconds.
• subscriptions_initial_delay the initial delay in milliseconds before starting the synchronization.
• subscriptions_head_expiration_interval: how long before a disable list expires, by default, in milliseconds.
• subscriptions_default_expiration_interval: how long before the list expires, by default, in milliseconds.

0.4.0 - 2021/09/10

Changes

The snippet library format has changed and is incompatible with the one usable in the previous release.

Bug fixes

• Fixed #302 - remove snippets
• Fixed #362 - inject snippets as bundles