IE12's New Extension Engine, What It Means for ABP-IE?

[lem]

I've mentioned in the past that the IE team is working on some type of new extension support for IE12. It looks like that is plan is a go for IE12 as announced by Neowin (http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-exp ... on-support). It will be a Chrome-like engine, so adapting to it will be fairly straight forward I presume. But no specifics yet.

That will be a problem for the current development of APB-IE. It will be of little use in term of compatibility for IE12's new extension engine. I've not look at the codes for ABP-IE, nor will I have the time to, so I'll just throw this question out there blindingly. Is it possible to re-purpose ABP-IE into a system-wide HTTP/HTTPS proxy filtering engine? Something like that of Adguard or Adfender.

Edited: Also a little interesting tidbits, the IE team actually considered adopting Webkit for future IEs before saying nope because of of legacy 'compatibility'. They pointed out as specifically as the "F1" helper pages as one of the legacies. Yup, those little help pages are preventing IE to adopt Webkit

[lewisje]

Indeed, .chm files are rendered in Trident, and so is Web content from applications that embed the WebBrowser control.

Anyway, IIRC ABP for IE is a mostly a wrapper around Blink components, so that as much as possible of ABP for Chrome could be re-used; I don't think this could be transformed into a system-wide proxy, but the efforts in developing ABP for Android would be well suited to such a project (probably a fork or mod for Privoxy).

Actually, the first time Palant tried to make ABP for IE, before Chrome even existed, he was told, in essence, "Why don't you just make a filtering proxy?"

[Gingerbread Man]

I don't see any posts about IE12 on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/, the official blog. There's also no Wikipedia page yet. Then there's http://status.modern.ie but I can't tell if that's of any use to an add-on developer.

I think we'll need more than a bit of speculation and zero concrete information before we know anything for sure.

[lem]

I just want to revisit this thread as the looming indications of an Chrome-compatible extension engine is very likely going to be announced for Spartan (https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/555750534028611585). I know you guys put a lot of work into ABP IE, and I don't want it to be obsolete by Microsoft's sweeping changes as they have recently done so with their other products.

The good news is that porting ABP to Spartan will be easy. The bad news is what to do with ABP for legacy IE?

[lewisje]

The good news is that porting ABP to Spartan will be easy. The bad news is what to do with ABP for legacy IE?

Keep developing it, because lots of people will be on Windows 7 for a long time, and it looks like Spartan will be an upgrade to Metro-mode IE and therefore not available for Windows 7; it's not like Opera where the old line was utterly unmaintained: Windows 7, and IE11 with it, will be maintained until early 2020.

[4od]

The good news is that porting ABP to Spartan will be easy. The bad news is what to do with ABP for legacy IE?

Keep developing it, because lots of people will be on Windows 7 for a long time, and it looks like Spartan will be an upgrade to Metro-mode IE and therefore not available for Windows 7; it's not like Opera where the old line was utterly unmaintained: Windows 7, and IE11 with it, will be maintained until early 2020.

agreed.

mainstream support ended for Windows 7 this month so that likely means no new updates for IE, just security updates.

I for one love ABP and will be keeping Win7 for as long as I can so I hope development will keep going, even when "Spartan" will be released.

It also looks like they will be releasing a separate IE12 for compatibility on Windows 10 a long with "Spartan".