[ Changelog ]
What's changed.
Every winnower release, newest first. Chrome updates winnower for you.
v0.7.0
LatestRemoved
- Update notice: winnower no longer checks GitHub once a day for a new version, and the green dot on its toolbar icon is gone. winnower is on the Chrome Web Store now, and Chrome keeps it up to date. It sends nothing anywhere.
v0.6.0
Added
- Site fixes for sites with many addresses: some of the filter lists' site fixes are written for a name under any ending, such as
example.*for example.com, example.net and example.co.uk. winnower skipped these until now. From the lists that are on by default, that is about 630 more rules. Each list's fixes still follow its switch in winnower's menu. - More of uBlock's site fixes: about 140 site fixes in uBlock Origin's own lists did not run in winnower. Most are ones uBlock only runs from lists it trusts, because they can change more of a page, such as rewriting text or setting cookies. winnower now runs them as uBlock does, using uBlock Origin's own code for them.
Changed
- Blocked count: the number on winnower's toolbar icon now counts only requests that were actually blocked. Before, a few requests that the lists' exception rules let through were counted too. If you run another blocker alongside winnower, what it blocks is now counted as well, because Chrome doesn't say which extension blocked a request.
Fixed
- YouTube: two of winnower's YouTube rules never ran, because of a mistake in how they were written. They remove ads from the videos you open after the first one. They now run.
v0.5.1
Fixed
- Prime Video on Amazon: ads were not blocked when you watched Prime Video on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de or amazon.co.jp, only on primevideo.com. They are now blocked there too. Shopping pages on those sites are unaffected.
v0.5.0
Added
- Netflix ad blocking: blocks ad breaks and the ad shown while a video is paused, in films and shows on netflix.com. The row under On this page in winnower's menu counts the breaks skipped, and warns if it cannot find Netflix's player while a video is open.
Changed
- Blocked count: the number on winnower's toolbar icon, and blocked on this tab in its menu, now count each blocked address once per page. Before, a page that kept retrying the same tracker added one every time, so Netflix passed a thousand in ten minutes while paused. Expect lower numbers on most sites.
v0.4.0
Added
- Prime Video ad blocking: blocks ads before and during films and shows on primevideo.com. The row under On this page in winnower's menu now names the site it has rules for, YouTube or Prime Video, and reads Site scripts everywhere else.
- Site fixes from the filter lists: winnower now runs the scripts the filter lists include for individual sites, which it skipped until now. From the lists that are on by default, that is about 2,500 rules across 3,500 sites. Each list's fixes follow its switch in winnower's menu.
Changed
- Faster pages: busy pages load and scroll faster, most noticeably image searches and news sites. Chrome now only checks the hiding rules that could apply to each part of a page, instead of all of them. The same elements are hidden as before.
Fixed
- Rules the lists switch off: uBlock's lists switch off some rules from other lists because they break sites, and winnower was still applying 118 of them. It now leaves them off, as uBlock Origin does.
v0.3.0
Added
- Paused sites: winnower's menu now lists every site you have paused, behind a Paused sites button below "On this page". You can resume blocking on any of them straight from the list, without visiting the site first. Until now the menu only ever told you about the site you happened to be on, so the only way to find out whether you had paused something was to go there and look.
- Diagnostics: winnower now keeps a record of what it does, and the menu has a Diagnostics view with a Copy button. Errors are always recorded, so if a site breaks you can copy what happened and paste it into a report without setting anything up or making it happen again first. Developer mode, which you turn on by clicking the version number at the bottom of the menu five times, records every decision winnower makes rather than only the errors. Nothing is ever sent anywhere, and the record is thrown away when you close your browser.
- New version notice: winnower checks whether a newer version has been released, as soon as you install it and once a day after that. When one has, the toolbar icon's badge turns green and the menu shows 0.3.0 available at the top, linking to the download. Chrome never updates winnower for you, because it is installed from a zip, so until now there was no way to find out a new version existed. This is the only time winnower contacts anything after you install it: it asks GitHub for the latest version number and nothing else, with no account, no identifier and nothing recorded about you.
Fixed
- Twitch: the video player no longer turns into a solid block of color when you reload a channel page. winnower tidies away the empty boxes an ad leaves behind when it hides one, and it was counting boxes the site had emptied itself as its own work. On Twitch that meant removing the space the player sits in, leaving the channel's background color showing through while the stream carried on playing with no picture. It now only tidies up after itself, which also fixes the same mistake on any other site that keeps its video player outside the part of the page it appears in.
- Gaps left where ads were: winnower now watches a page for as long as you have it open, instead of stopping seven seconds after it loads. Ads that arrive late, on a slow connection or further down a page as you scroll, had their space left behind as an empty gap, because winnower had stopped looking by the time they appeared.
v0.2.1
Fixed
- Pausing a site: pausing winnower on a site now stops it hiding things inside content the page has embedded from somewhere else, too. Before, the page itself was left alone while anything embedded in it was still filtered.
- When winnower is unsure: if it cannot tell which site a page belongs to, or cannot read your settings (both possible for a moment after a browser or extension restart), it now blocks nothing rather than risk filtering a site you had paused.
v0.2.0
Added
- Website: winnower's details page in
chrome://extensionslinks to winnower.meistyr.tech.
Changed
- Toolbar icon: now the leaf on its own, without the rounded tile around it.
- Toolbar menu: the logo at the top is a little larger, and the section labels and notes are easier to read.
- Description: the line under winnower's name in
chrome://extensionsnow reads "A free, open-source content blocker. Every page in its final shape."
Fixed
- Sign-in and share windows: windows a site opens to sign you in with Google are no longer blocked, and neither are the ones it opens to Facebook, bit.ly, t.co, Adobe and about 100 other sites. Popup blocking was treating a filter meant for one address on a site as a block on the whole site.
v0.1.0
First release.
Added
- Network blocking: about 130,000 blocking rules from ten community filter lists (uBlock Origin, EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's list, EasyList Cookie List and Fanboy's Annoyance List), grouped into Ads, Tracking, Popups, Cookie banners and Annoyances. Cookie banners and Annoyances start switched off, because they are the lists most likely to break a site.
- YouTube ad blocking: blocks ads before and during videos, including when you move from one video to the next.
- Element hiding: hides ads that are part of the page, on every site and with rules for specific sites, and hides the empty boxes they leave behind.
- Popup and popunder blocking: blocks popups and popunders from known ad networks, including popunders a page opens with a script.
- Toolbar menu: pause winnower on the site you're on, turn it off everywhere, switch filter lists on and off, see how many requests were blocked, and see what actually ran on the page you're looking at.
- Toolbar icon: follows Chrome's light or dark mode.
- Release zip: loads with Load unpacked, with
CREDITS.txtnaming every filter list and the license it declares.
The full CHANGELOG.md is on GitHub.