I've been plugging away recently on the feature set that will go into 4.x. So what's going to be in it?
Well, far and away the biggest update is going to be a change to a more per-site experience. I kicked around a lot of ideas last year on this, but I never quite got some of my experiments working out like I hoped. So instead, I'd like to get a bit more simplified approach out there. Here's what it looks like in normal view and with the on/off switch shown:
Basically the zones are tracked site-by-site now, with the ability to override by site. This helps the browsing experience enormously if one site is bumping up the levels but the other sites are fine. You can also pick the fixed zone for the site and go from there. With the on/off button shown, you can also choose to not filter for a given site. I hope that this experience is familiar for people who use uBlock Origin, for example. Note that the default site zone may be of interest for starting in more conservative modes than Adaptive.
Second, KetchupDreamer had a good idea around the on/off switch. What if there was a smart pause timer that you could pick to disable all filtering for a set time and then reenable it? Well, now that's an option!
Third, the default experience for silent mode has been improved. While setting up your own collection is supported the same as it has been, the default collection acts differently. Not everyone loves the default images that are packed into the addon and importantly the switch in subject matter is often quite visible and pulls the eye towards the changes. This kind of defeats the point of the silent mode being silent. So the default behavior is going to now try to reuse a slightly modified image that was previously seen on that page (watermark is added, slight view change). In many cases, only a few images may be blocked on a page of images, and so doing the change this way instead often blends in seamlessly in a way that the old one did not. It will in some cases eventually fall back to the packed in images but this should be more rare. I'd encourage folks to give this mode a try and see what they think.
Speaking of encouraging folks to try certain things, one of the key final changes is around the initial setup experience. I gave it some thought and the two main options I think many people would need to consider are the silent image mode and whether or not the on/off switch are shown. So here's the first time setup wizard that helps with that:
It's my hope this will help make users aware of the options that may be most important to them.
As a final note, I've been enjoying using Codex during the development of 4.x. I'm not the strongest on the HTML based UI and it's helped a lot with coding that up. Additionally, there are several features that have been on the todo list for a few years and it's helping turn those into realities rather than staying as dusty dreams.
I'd like to give this a bit longer to bake but it's getting closer. All the features listed above have already been implemented and you can try them out if you're a developer right now!
