Upcoming release

"Release early; release often."

I know I just pushed up 1.2, but I just realized I could hook the BeforeNavigate2 event and pre-filter downloads from blocked URLs before the download even begins. This should presumably save bandwidth, and stops blocked images/scripts from even loading (avoiding that momentary flicker on the screen).

It also, in my highly unscientific tests, seems to be faster.

There is a downside. In this event, I don't know

a) the type of the thing being downloaded (image, flash, etc)
b) the hosting site

This breaks some of the specificity of our rules, though I don't think that specificity is really used. But it means that if you had:

http://bad/
http://bad/

then downloads to http://bad/, even from site "exception," would be blocked. This is counter to the defined semantics.

So I think I'm going to break the rule semantics a bit for the next release, which will be coming shortly. I have to think about this a bit more--and look at what other adblockers do--before I figure out the right approach.

1.1 Release Ahead of Schedule

This is embarrassing. I was going to make a release with the new features discussed below this weekend, after more testing. But I just discovered a bug in my installer setup that didn't show itself on my dev machine (a missing dependency that I had on my dev machine because it's my dev machine). While this is alpha software, I feel pretty stupid having pushed out an MSI that didn't actually work, especially since I did at least do nominal dev testing on a second machine.

I've just put up a new build, sooner than expected, with the fix and the new features. I also put up the dev and release builds. The only difference is that the dev build will show asserts and exceptions and logs data (which elements were blocked or not blocked) to %TEMP%\Low\adblock.log. If you're interested in this sort of thing, try the dev build. If not, stick with the release.

(In the future, I'll provide a simpler way for getting those data, but I didn't want to hold this release up any longer due to the MSI bug.)

As always, thanks for your patience while I'm still in the apha stage, and use the Discussions page to let me know about any problems.