Slashdot Mirror

For me the line was crossed when I ran into a talking flash ad on Slashdot. Since then I've been using Flashblock which blocks everything by default and lets you play individual flash pieces.

flashblock is great!

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

I use the Forecastfox plugin for firefox to give me forecasts for my local area. maybe an idea for you.

... in my web browser using Forecast Fox.

And I wouldn't exactly say that weather.com is "useless". I can visit the site and it tells me what the forecast for taday, tonight, and tomorrow is. For me, that is typically enough. (And a weekend or 10-day forecast is one-click away too.)

Of course, if I am feeling frisky and want to look at nifty Java apps for radar data, I'll visit IntelliCast or some other site.

Again, for me, seeing the weather for today and tomorrow in my status bar is all the functionality I typically require.

Check it out, it uses the weather.com data

http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/

Sure, you can copy-and-paste anything you want into your URL bar, and hit enter. This takes time, and thought, and you have to look at the string in two different places, so it's reasonably secure based on that.

The only security problems that could arise would be if there were links that you could click on, or bookmark them. Try it here (slashdot won't let you write chrome:// URLs unfortunately). It doesn't work.

There are tons of security measures related to XPI/XUL, the Firefox team has IMHO taken an OVERLY aggressive approach to XUL/XPI issues. You know why there are several extra steps required in Firefox to install an XPI plugin? Because there were some theoretical exploits where someone might ask a user to click on a place on the screen over and over (eg. hit the monkey), and then display the XPI dialog there, and the user might end up clicking "yes, please install" before they realized that they were running potentially suspicious code. So now users have to wait a few seconds before being able to click.

Users CAN actually configure their browser to let remote sites do just about anything, include read/write files, change the clipboard, etc., because this is sometimes something that's useful that users might want from a few special sites. But it's a pain in the butt to get the several security configuration settings set properly, and again, as a developer, I think they might have overdone it.

Is this the way Slashdot supports open source, fostering internal divides in exchange of ad eyeballs?

Ads? I don't see any ads on Slashdot. Oh wait, that's because I use Firefox with Adblock installed. :)

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Fastclick, a major ad network, started exploiting this to get its popups around Firefox's popup blocker. The ad scripts load a small Flash movie which then lauches the popup.

1. install adblock for firefoxhttp://adblock.mozdev.org/
2. download the latest filter from here http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/

Flashblock is a good extension to get rid of this problem; as long as you don't mind clicking on those flash driven plugins you actually want.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by #1, but #3 is available via extensions like Session Saver or Crash Recovery or by bookmarking groups of tabs. #4 is also available as an extension called FlashBlock.

Flashblock is too heavy handed, and too buggy. The problem is that it's a plugin that modifies another plugin, which doesn't really work reliably.

The Mozilla PrefBar has a Kill Flash button, and also a checkbox that allows you to enable or disable Flash as you see fit.

I've never used flashblock, and hadn't heard of it before. The *first match* on a google search for the word "flashblock" took me to their site:

flashblock.mozdev.org

Looks like an easy install, although for some reason you're supposed to restart the browser twice. Hope it works for you!

Are these ads as prevelant as the article suggests? I went and browsed with IE a bunch of the sites listed (MSN, ESPN, NY Times) and saw nary a floater.

First, we need to get Flash under user control

Flashblock does just what you are looking for.

Unfortunatly it doesn't work for Flash animations. Then I discovered FlashBlock (http://flashblock.mozdev.org)

I would like this opertunity to thank the Adblock team for making such a good extension and making the web a safer and saner place to surf.

x (Paranoia) is what you're looking for.

Sorry, the link above should be this.

1. Install Firefox.
2. Enable popup blocking
3. Install Adblock
4. Install filter rule set for Adblock.

Every now and then, Adblock lets an ad through, but you can just right-click it and select "block ad", which augments your filter rule set. Now a real killer feature for Adblock would be for it to somehow filter ad indirection pages, i.e. you go to a page but are indirected through a page with a giant ad. Currently that page will look mostly empty because Adblock blocks the giant banner, but maybe Adblock could be improved to auto-skip to the next page... which should be easy to find because it is the redirect URL.

Here's a convenient link for those too lazy to Google for it: NukeAnything. Note, however, that this is a one-time nuke only; the object will be back the next time you view the page.

After using Dan Pollock's hosts file for a few months, virtually all of that monkey business has disappeared. That, Firefox, and Adblock have made the web bearable for me.

Flashblock http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Get this extension and be happy:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Flash animations show as buttons until you click on them.

Flashblock. Won't play them until you want.

I bet the rate of change for pup-up decline was correlated to the rate of change to Mozilla users until Microsoft SP2 was forced to offer pop up blocking. The floaters can have their day and again Mozy users have a slight advantage. If IE users get tired of it then I imagine the only company in an real danger would be Macromedia from people simply refusing to install advertisement generating software on their own machine.

...thinks... it's called User Agent Switcher

I totally agree.
Check http://conkeror.mozdev.org/

You can also simply set the number of days in the History option under privacy to 0. An even better idea is to start firefox with the -profilemanager commandline paramater, create a special profile called somthing such as "noprofile", and set all the cache, history, cookies etc... to not be stored. You can then make a script/shortcut file that runs "firefox -profile noprofile" which will load that profile.

You can do things such as put an obviouly diffrent skin on it to make sure you arn't running the wrong profile and install flashgot to allow you to grab entire image/movie gallerys.

You can have a custom adblock filter list to remove nonrelevant images such as those backgrounds, banners and image borders that sites have which slows down your browsing.

Under linux I have everything setup to use an highly encrypted filesystem so nothing can be accessed without the password, if you have your images, firefox profile, and its starting script in there then noone will beable to find anything also because its encrypted and only accessable by you, you can leave the history to be saved and create bookmarks etc. Just remember to unmount the filesystem and clear the loopback device.

Not for me. Running 1.0 on a patched XP box. Perhaps my adblock http://adblock.mozdev.org/ settings are blockig it?

If you don't have adblock, get it! It's the killer extension for Firefox.

I'll be happy when Thunderbird's address book can at least import and export vCard records, and has an easy way to send my address as a vCard.

Address book with no support for import and export of industry standard format = not useful.

Yes, I know people have hacked together extensions and Perl scripts. That's not the point. It should be part of the standard core application.

AdBlock rules!

please look up at the top of your browser window and tell me what you see?

nothing

Sure, here it is.

Try:
slashdt - Did you mean slashdot?
sourcefore - Did you mean sourceforge?

Sometimes you get strange results though:
pr0n - Did you mean slashdot?

Does Mozilla even use Java 1.4? According to this page, you need a special plugin to even use Java 1.4.1 or later on OSX under Mozilla. It's not clear to me whether that still applies to Camino .8.2.

Pay-to-surf was a British attempt to pay people to watch advertising online - it failed, partly because a lot of users found a way to move the advertising off-screen using virtual desktops

Now we are in the age of pop-up blocking and adblock, a few REGEXP filters and a bit of custom config will probably let a lot of users very easily remove the advertising content... unless, that is, they intend to use a dedicated client instead of open standards for their wifi hotspots, in which case mac and linux laptops probably won't work with it anyway.

Does that work well with adblock?

I think you are looking for Preferential, which lists most of these (at least the ones that you would ever want to muck around with).

There are several other Firefox tweaking guides out there that suggest some specific values you might want to muck around with, and searching around on MozillaZine's forums will yield many specific tips and tricks (or just look in a few of the sticky posts there) for commonly used about:config hacks.

flashblock replaces all flash with an (F) icon, which can be clicked, enabling the flash to play. 99% of the time i don't want flash, but in the case of strongbad, of course, i click :)

Using something like FlashBlock will stop this ad from loading. Kill two annoying birds with one stone.

Even better, try flashblock. It's an extension for firefox that will block flash files from being loaded until you click on them, get it at flashblock.mozdev.org

I guess you need to install the adblocker extension. I'm having no troubles at all, and I followed all provided links to check!

A solution to this is to install the AdBlock extension for Mozilla/Firefox. Once you've done this, grab this list of search strings. Once you've done this, import the text file and you should be home free. Try to keep that file updated as it should be a good starting-off point, but will become outdated as time goes by.

The Flashblock extension and my userContent.css file have helped me not see any new ads or pop-ups in Firefox.

My second option which works on both OS's, I grabbed the Firefox Plugin called adblock. This eliminates banners and such, but not the actual pop-up window. What you can do from there is right click on the annoying pop up, choose "Adblock Image" copy the main url (eg. http://images.slashdot.org/) and in the web features section (under options in Firefox) ad the url to the block list. It's done wonders for me.

Pop-up free for me, but adblock did block two javascript items which is probably why. With a combination of adblock and userContent.css in firefox I'm still pop-up ad free.

You might want to try something similar. If things get really desparate, using an blocking HOSTS file can help as well.

Lately I've been hearing complaints by people using Firefox of some sites having pop-ups come up again. The biggest complaint coming from people that visit The Drudge Report. I too have seen them.

However, ever since I started using the Adblock extension, as well as keeping an updated list of definitons, I haven't had these problems lately.

...

AdBlock seems like a better ad-blocking method than the hosts file. You can have wildcards that will catch many cases like */ads/* and even if you need to block sites you can catch them with a wildcard like http://*.intellitxt.com/*