Added basic Thunderbird support

[M-Reimer]

This is basic Thunderbird support.

I just fixed as much as needed to get zero errors in error console. I guess the fact, that "watching for tab changes" works completely different in Thunderbird, protects me from having to do more to get a basic compatibility ;)

Working:

• Blocking itself (worked right from the start even without changes)
• Opening of new content tabs (to be able to actually open Dashboard and Logger)
• Dashboard and Logger are fully working. So it actually is possible to do settings. Both have to be opened from the Addons manager

NOT working:

• Icon for toolbar
• Integration with the browser

This is meant as a start and does well for my needs. It allows to block ads, tracking, social buttons, ... from content if Thunderbird is used as RSS reader. To get full support much more things would have to be changed as Thunderbird works completely different in many cases.

[gorhill]

Do you have a RSS URL to which I can subscribe to see uBlock Origin in action on Thunderbird?

[r-a-y]

Nice to see this taking shape.

Thanks for working on this @M-Reimer!

[curiosity-seeker]

This is great news, indeed! However, may I suggest to adjust minversion to 31.8 as that version is still used in Debian Jessie? Thanks!

[M-Reimer]

@gorhill Seems like you've already found a RSS URL. Thank you for merging my changes!

@curiosity-seeker I think someone would have to test with this version and as I'm no Debian user (Arch Linux here) and don't want to mess around with old outdated packages from Mozilla FTP, someone else would have to do this.

[gorhill]

Seems like you've already found a RSS URL

No I did not.

[M-Reimer]

Many news sites offer RSS feeds. For example: http://www.heise.de/news-extern/news.html

To view feeds in "website mode" you have to do the following after selecting one of the feed entries:

• Open menu (button with three parallel lines)
• Open sub-menu "View"
• Choose "Feed Message Body As" --> "Web Page" there

[gorhill]

Ok I did fix a bug introduced when I revised the code, plus a couple other errors console (re. context menu, etc), and all seems fine now in latest b2 iteration.

Thanks for taking the initiative of making uBlock Origin compatible with Thunderbird.

[curiosity-seeker]

I think someone would have to test with this version and as I'm no Debian user

Okay, I changed the minversion in install.rdf to 31.8.0 and was able to install it in Icedove. I deactivated AdblockPlus and opened uBlock0's logger in a new tab which showed blocked and non-blocked items.

However, after restarting Icedove the logger tab was still open but the logger remained completely empty. Only after closing the logger tab and opening the logger again I could see logged items again.

I have the impression, though, that the logger shows less items than AdblockPlus. However, this could be due to the fact that when switching from one mail to another previously opened mail the items of the latter are no longer shown at the top of the logger probably because they are cached whereas they are always shown in AdblockPlus. Another difference is that ABP even shows blocked and non-blocked items when external contents are blocked in Icedove (which is the default behavior) while uBlock seems to show items in its logger only when external contents are allowed for that mail. BTW, it would be nice if there were are a button to easily open the logger.

Another observation: It's not easy to associate the items in the logger with a specific mail. Yes, it's possible to select a mail in the "Page selector". But all you see is something like this:

mailbox:///home/xxx/.icedove/ab123.default/Mail/pop.gmx.net/PC-WELT?number=3940173

which is not very intuitive ;-)

EDIT: A further observation: Once I allow external content in a mail its blocked and non-blocked items appear in the logger - but only after several seconds which is a bit irritating. The logger in Firefox is considerably faster.

[curiosity-seeker]

The fact that uBlock0 only blocks items if external contents are allowed in a mail is actually a big disadvantage compared to ABP. Here is an example of a part of a mail where external contents are blocked. The big empty spaces/frames/rectangles which would normally contain ads can be removed in ABP to make the mail much more readable. Unfortunately, this is not possible with uBlock0:

[M-Reimer]

However, after restarting Icedove the logger tab was still open but the logger remained completely empty. Only after closing the logger tab and opening the logger again I could see logged items again.

I can reproduce this one. Unfortunately I don't get any errors in error console. May it be possible that the logger tab loads too early? How exactly does the uBlock Origin backend connect to the logger tab?

[M-Reimer]

Forget my last comment. Fixed with my new Pull Request. There is code in uBlock Origin to close such tabs. There was just some modification needed to make it work on Thunderbird.