About features for the (new) ad blocker

[Mario Sanchez Prada <msanchez igalia com>]

Hi all,

Recently, I started to take a look into the pending tasks in the 3.2
roadmap for ephy [1] and grabbed the one about rewriting the ad blocker,
following the suggestions I've seen in [1]:

    "[...] We can copy the adblock core code from Midori and 
     keep the boilerplate, for example [...]"

So I checked out Midori's code and did some work on creating a kind of
Frankenstein between Midori's adblocker and Ephy's, so I could iterate
from there, and I have now some questions about that:

A. Should we maintain the possibility of adding "new rules" to be 
   considered in black and white lists, as ephy does now? Or would it
   be ok to do what midori does now? that is, just allowing the user to
   specify URIs with preconfigured filter lists.

B. Should we actually allow the user to configure the ad blocker at all?
   Yes, I'm suggesting to drop the settings dialog, so no more handling
   black/white lists, additional URIs.. just the extension (un)loaded.

C. In case answer for B is "yes, we should allow the user to configure 
   some things".. should we keep the last page in the notebook for the 
   current adblocker's settings dialog?, where the user could force an
   update of the rules from the predefined URI? Obviously, that
   predefined URI wouldn't be the same ephy was using so far (list of
   predefined filters from Filterset.G [2]) has been discontinued some
   time ago, so the URI ephy's current ad blocker was using [3] is down.


My current opinion is:

A. I wouldn't use that white/black listing thing from ephy as I'd rather
trust the a preconfigured list of filters like the one Midori uses [4].

B. Not sure about not giving the user any chance to configure the ad
blocker. I think allowing the user at least to add new filters is good.

C. I would drop that and make sure that the list gets refreshed whenever
the extension is loaded. Don't see the point of the manual "update".

However, it's obvious I'm thinking of my very particular use cases so
that's why I'd like to hear others' opinions as well.

Thanks
Mario

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/Roadmap3.2
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filterset.G
[3] http://www.pierceive.com/filtersetg
[4] http://adblockplus.mozdev.org/easylist/easylist.txt