safari: No way to adjust settings, without having the ABP button in the toolbar.

[Redoubts]

For ABP in Safari Beta,

There should be a way to adjust the settings by Going to Safari Preferences > Extensions. A similar workflow exists for Firefox, by going to Add-Ons > Extensions > Options, and I think this should be recreated for Safari.

Currently the only way to adjust ABP settings after install is to keep the ABP icon in the Toolbar, but I would rather not clutter my browser with extra buttons that don't get used regularly.

[philll]

@sebastian: You might evaluate this.

[sebastian]

Safari's settings panel is very limited. So most of our options UI can't be implemented that way. Also I would like to avoid implementing and maintaining two different option UIs.

However in order to provide another way to access to the options page, we could:

• Add a checkbox to the settings panel, that will open the options page when toggled.
• Add a context menu (right click into any page) entry, that opens the options page.
• Provide a web page, that can be bookmarked, and will show the options page.

I'm not convinced yet which if any of those options should be the way to go.

[sebastian]

I have sent following feature request to Apple:

The Safari Extension Settings API is very limited. Hence a lot of extensions (like our extension "Adblock Plus") use an HTML page for their settings. But the only way to link your settings page is from the toolbar icon menu/popover.

However Safari users expect to find extension settings under Preferences -> Extensions. And some users even customize their toolbar in order to remove extension icons.

So please provide a more straight-forward way to access extension settings, like one of following:

1. Add buttons to the list of UI controls available in the extension settings panel. So we can add a button that opens our options page.
2. Allow HTML inside the extension settings panel. So rich configuration UIs can be implemented where they belong.
3. Add an option to specify an options page to Info.plist, and automatically link the options page in the extensions settings panel, like Chrome does.

[philll]

The assigned state will be dropped by #403

[sebastian]

I got following response from Apple:

Engineering has determined that your bug report is a duplicate of another issue and will be closed.

The open or closed status of the original bug report your issue was duplicated to appears in the yellow "Duplicate of XXXXXXXX" section of the bug reporter user interface. This section appears near the top of the right column's bug detail view just under the bug number, title, state, product and rank.

If you have any questions or concerns, please update your report directly here: ​http://bugreport.apple.com/.

So apparently somebody else has already issued the same feature request. And since Safari's issue tracker lets you only see your own issues, I can neither read nor follow the original feature request.

Also we have decided to not use any ugly hacks here, to work around Safari's limitations. But wait until Safari provides a decent solution, like those suggested in our feature request.

[sebastian]

With the traditional Adblock Plus Safari extension being phased out, in favor of a native app, not to mention the limitations of Safari which are unlikely to be lifted, this is becoming irrelevant.