Update "whitelisted" ABP icon in Customizations extension

[trev]

Background

Our Customizations extensions has a "Special icon for whitelisted pages" option. This is essentially a legacy feature, one that shows a green circle instead of the grey octagon on whitelisted pages - meaning whenever ABP is merely disabled locally and not globally. In addition to missing a 32x32 variant, these icons haven't been updated in the past few iterations of the ABP icon and got completely out of sync now. Here are the files currently used:

What to change

The following icons are just uniform green circles with a grey border. The ABP text from the usual icons has been placed on top:

The ABP text transparency has been reconstructed using the following Python code (here for 32x32, similarly for other sizes):

from PIL import Image

i = Image.open('abp-status-32.png').convert('RGBA').crop((2,10,30,22))
for x in range(i.size[0]):
  for y in range(i.size[1]):
    r, g, b, a = i.getpixel((x, y))
    if r:
      i.putpixel((x, y), (255, 255, 255, g))

i.save('abp-32.png')

[trev]

@sven: I'll implement these icons unless you have objections.

[sven]

After having a deeper look into that my conclusion is that I'm really not a fan of this feature because it's giving people the opportunity to revert the UI improvement and go back to the confusing behavior.

Instead of giving people the opportunity to use a green ABP icon, it would rather make way more sense to give people the chance to change the icon like they want (use icon from personal hard drive or use a link). This would ensure downward compatibility and we would implement the feature that we want to give people in ABP in the future anyway. Therefore i would not change the icon but suggest to improve the feature.

Also i'm wondering why this is an own extension, instead of being included in the firefox extension itself.

[trev]

Replying to sven:

After having a deeper look into that my conclusion is that I'm really not a fan of this feature because it's giving people the opportunity to revert the UI improvement and go back to the confusing behavior.

Some people rely on that confusing behavior (distinguishing "disabled everywhere" and "disabled on this website" in the icon) and simply want to have it back instead of messing with own images.

Instead of giving people the opportunity to use a green ABP icon, it would rather make way more sense to give people the chance to change the icon like they want (use icon from personal hard drive or use a link).

That would go way too far.

Also i'm wondering why this is an own extension, instead of being included in the firefox extension itself.

Because it is a footgun. As I explained to you earlier, the Customizations extension is meant for advanced users. This functionality would only cause confusion if included in the main extension.

[sven]

Some people rely on that confusing behavior (distinguishing "disabled everywhere" and "disabled on this website" in the icon) and simply want to have it back instead of messing with own images.

The important part is to find out why they want to have this confused behavior. I'm sure that there is a better reason than to only like a confusing behavior.

Like i said, i'm strictly against supporting officially a green ABP toolbar-icon here which looks similar to our current one. The reason is that we could use this green icon for other purposes in our future development. And if so, the confusion will be even worse.

Because it is a footgun. As I explained to you earlier, the Customizations extension is meant for advanced users. This functionality would only cause confusion if included in the main extension.

If there are advanced options than they could be marked as such in a software. If someone is confused by the option than it might be because the option is not explained good enough. Building own software tools only to create further options is even more confusing. Ask yourself how many people in our team know about this tool for example? These Options could be easily implemented in the new options page where they IMO belong to.

Because of the reasons described above i would stick to the old, round, green toolbar-icon and refuse this change request for now.

[trev]

Replying to sven:

The important part is to find out why they want to have this confused behavior. I'm sure that there is a better reason than to only like a confusing behavior.

The point is that we have two options to disable Adblock Plus - globally and just on a single website. Some people make use of these options frequently, e.g. because they have to figure out whether the website is just broken or Adblock Plus had a false positive. And they want the state to be visualized accordingly.

If there are advanced options than they could be marked as such in a software.

We've been there already, it's impossible to mark anything as "advanced" in a software used by tens of millions people - it will produce tons of support requests no matter what. Customizations has 22 thousands of users right now, people are pointed towards it if they ask for unusual functionality. And we don't put in the same effort to maintain it as we do with usual Adblock Plus functionality.

[trev]

Replying to sven:

Because of the reasons described above i would stick to the old, round, green toolbar-icon and refuse this change request for now.

I don't really want to argue endlessly about these reasons. I've created a new set of icons, these are round but use the same text in the same position as our new icons - meaning that the icon state change won't look ugly. Any problem with using these instead of leaving things in a broken state?

[fhd]

I think the discussion got quite derailed here. What matters is that we do have the customisations extension in production and should update the icon. What we want to do with the customisations extension and its individual features in the future should be discussed elsewhere.

[christiane]

it's fine to update the icons as you suggested except for the green you used. please change it to: R63 G128 B42

[philll]

Made Firefox and Firefox mobile available as seperate platforms.

[trev]

Took me a while to get back to this. I re-created the icons with the correct shade of green now.

[trev]

Fixed: ​https://hg.adblockplus.org/abpcustomization/rev/fcfa234b648b