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End Run Around Pop-up Blockers
An anonymous reader writes "The pop-up arms race continues, cnet has this article on how advertisers are responding to pop-up blockers." Can't wait for a full page of javascripted user-initiated pop-ups.
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What's a popup? Between Safari on my Mac and Mozilla on Win/Linux, I can't remember the last time that I saw a non-user initiated popup.
Any workarounds the ad companies have found must be for the way the google toolbar works, not any of the above programs and their methodologies for blocking popups.
Since I don't use IE and that toolbar at all, I don't care!
So let's get this straight- one "photographer from the UK" installed Google popup blocker, and then it stopped working(probably, if anything, because her machine got infected with spyware/adware). What about Mozilla's blocking functionality? Opera? Safari? Oops, that'd be asking too much of our dear news.com.com.com.com.com reporter(and folks- remember why they use "news.com.com"; so their tracking cookies work across all their sites).
I use Safari's popup blocking setting and it works fantastically. All of the time. Since the day I started using Safari- ie, the day it was publicly beta'd.
What I really want, however, is a "turn off flash" quick menu item, same for animated gifs; Opera had that, and it was great. Disabling all plugins actually works pretty well too, and kills off many rather annoying ads.
Please help metamoderate.
It is probably time to apply spam-blocking techniques to popup ads.
The article talks about how Javascript mouseover commands are being used to launch popup windows in a "user-prompted" fashion, thereby defeating Google's and other vendors' popup blockers that rely on detecting non-requested popups.
So, what is needed is a browser plugin that communicates with a central server. As a user of this plugin, when I encounter a popup ad or a Flash ad, I simply close it manually with ctrl-click or something similar, and the plugin reports the Javascript command that originally launched the ad to the server. Whenever any Web page tries to spawn a new window, the plugin checks with the server to see if the page and Javascript line in question is trying to spawn an ad. A plurality of "yes" votes -- ctrl-clicks from users like me who visited the page earlier -- would cause the plugin to suppress the unwanted window or Flash feature.
You would need a voting system to prevent abuse of the system by people reporting legitimately-requeted popups. Dynamically-composed pages would be another problem, but perhaps the domain-specific nature of ads would be sufficient to detect unwanted popups. (Even simple rules like "Never close windows spawned by mbnanetaccess.com; always close windows spawned by forbes.com" would be a big step ahead of the current state of the art in popup-blocking).
The ad's cost X per click for the twit paying for them. The rate is based on the amount of legitimate click throughs for the site.
How hard would it be to create a browser plugin that will hide the ads, but still 'click' on them? If the the number of such plugins in use became prevalent enough, then the advertisers would be charged more money, since their accounts show more click throughs. But since these are false positives, the increase in sales associated with those click throughs would not materialize.
Once this hits a critical mass, all such ads will become useless, nothing more then costly traffic that drains dramatically more revenue then it creates.
You wont get rats to stop trying to eat your food by hiding it. They just look harder for it because they know its still there. But if you can poison the food, they will die painfully.
END COMMUNICATION
I use Adblock, which is a firefox extension which also does flash banner blocking. As far as pop-ups go, the only ti'me I've ever had to deal with them on Firefox is with false-positive blocks - ie. Firefox thinks it's a pop-up, so it shows u a little "i" icon at the bottom left. Click it and tell Firefox that it's safe to allow it and you're good to go - usally happens with those annoying sites that use pop-up windows to log you in
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
People keep adding nifty new features to browsers without thinking through the security implications. Any unwanted behavior is a security issue.
The best solution is a browser that has built in popup support, not a lame IE hack of some kind. The worst solution is popup signitures which tend to change over time as companies try to break popup blockers which rely on signitures.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
...with Safari both at home and at work/school. I quite honestly forgot that popups exist.
Well, this is good to see, but I can't help but think that there is some marketing angle for MS behind it. Bumfuzzling. But then again, why would they offer pop-up blocking, but be so adamant against tabbed browsing? One is imitative of a supposed rival (Google not Mozilla/Safari/Firefox) so why not the other? I hate to ape /. canon, but tabbed browsing is the shiznit.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Are those really a problem for people?
Most definitely. My girlfriend and I recently got back from college, and I'm astounded what's happened to her family's computer. I haven't gotten over there to fix it yet (was planning to today actually), but she ran a virus scan and found 91 viruses, mostly adware (Hasn't actually scanned for adware yet). She can't use internet explorer because just opening it fills the screen with popups.
I guess this is what happens when two parrents and a fifteen year old who aren't at all tech savy are left with a computer for 9 months.
By using overlays & stylesheets you can float an ad on top of a regular web page.
And since mozilla is one of the few standards-complant browsers that allow you to do overlays properly, you can get these ads. If the DHTML serves the ad from the same site as the webhost, it is much, much harder to block.
adblock is cool. But for firefox there is a way to better block ads that I have found. If you modify your user-content.css you can make a stylesheet that prevents 99.9% of ads from rendering.
http://www.texturizer.net/firefox/adblock.html
There it is. Of course, this is a bad solution if you want to prevent ads from downloading. Since by using the user-content the ads still download, they just don't display. It's OK for me since my net connection is college quality.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Safari and Camino block all these popups except the ones that happen when you click on a link. This kind is about the closest you can come to legitimate. So, I would say they passed. I would assume that Camino and Firefox use the same engine for this, as they're both based on Mozilla, but I could be wrong there.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
> because her machine got infected
Is this one of those dumb uses of "her" in an attempt to not offend people easily offended by the use of "his"? If so, "their" is a perfectly good gender-neutral word.
Or of course, since the person's name was given as "Paul Haigh", I expect "his" would have been a better choice.
Him: "So does that mean you'll move back to Internet Explorer from Firefox since that was your main reason for switching?"
I switched to Firefox about a month ago, after I picked up a google browser hijack I coulden't get rid of, because it didn't support active X and VBscript the perferred methods of something like 80% of all unauthorized spyware/adware downloads.
The popup blocker was just a really nice extra bonus. When using IE w/ the Google Toolbar there were a few popups that got by now and then, but so far Firefox has been impervious. I am very happy with it.
SMOKE... are ya smokin yet?
I get most angry when i visit a friend's home, and they complain about the incessant pop-ups. Usually, they have gotten adware on their computer.
The sad thing is, they're usually ignorant of how it happened. I remember, two weeks ago, my buddy was using my computer, and i told him "Use Firefox" and he was like "No, I like IE." I went to pick up a friend, and by the time i got back, there was already some Claria powered program installed on my computer. He swore up and down he didn't install anything, but it didnt matter, i had to run Ad-Aware and SpyBot (Search and Destroy) to get rid of all the crap that had got installed in less than an hour.
Now, when i fix my friends's computers, i put Firefox and Privoxy on their computers. They don't bitch to me anymore about pop-ups.
gum2me?
Other "great" news from the cutting edge of advertising is that more full movie streaming ads will become popular (obviously with advertisers not with users) And worst of all what are currently blockable popup ads will be replaced with Flash overlays that fly around screen.
/.ers don't have too much to worry about.
All of these sound trivial to block. IE probably won't be updated to deal with them for years, if ever, but I forsee no problems for Firefox and Camino, and probably Safari.
For normal users this will all suck, but most of the ads probably won't work on a standard debian install so
Exactly. I've stopped caring about complaints from IE users who refuse to consider alternatives. It's like buying an SUV and then whining about gas prices.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I've always perferred a much simpler method to avoid those flash ads - don't install flash for mozilla. Very few of the sites I visit require flash, and if I really want to see a particular animation, I'll simply fire up IE for a few minutes.
Haven't seen a popup in ages (except in IE of course).
Jw
I've seen firefox fail to block pop-ups at the NYTimes and at Popular Science on more than one occasion. Maybe it DHTML. Dunno.
I don't use adblock, I maintain a hosts file with known ad servers so the stuff never loads in the first place.
if there would be some way for us humans to actually learn regexps...
:-)
:-)
Well, according to Chomsky's hierarchy, regular expressions are equivalent to the simplest possible languages (automatic ones). Human languages are context-dependent, i.e. two levels more complex! I suppose you get my point
BTW, programming languages are (usually) context-independent, i.e. right in the middle of regular expressions and natural languages. Therefore, every kid at the age of 2 should be able to learn programming really easy
That's not a very good way to look at the numbers. A better way is to point out the April 2003 numbers as well, Then you get a much better idea of the trend:
2002: 1.8 percent
2003: 6.0 percent
2004: 6.4 percent
The article says that the ads have tripled since the rise of the pop-up blockers, and while that's true, it is also true that the vast majority of that growth came before mid-2003. In the year since then, ad growth has been almost stangnant -- exactly what you would expect to see as the ad whores gradually realize that people hate their guts enough to take steps to rid them from their lives.
No, to me those numbers tell me the opposite of the conclusion reached by the article author. To me those numbers say that pop-up blockers were not only effective, they were noticed by the ad companies and it caused a slowdown in pop-up ad trends. Of course, being the lowlifes that they are, they are now going to other method to force us to see what we have explicitly shown them we don't want to see. But that's par for the course for these leeches.
FYI, there is an extension to Moz that allows you to
have "run in IE" in your context menu, so you'd
right click, select that and be done, no cutting
no pasting, no going to start button.
As a side note, I personally don't like your
approach. The goal isn't to keep Mozilla clean, the
goal is to keep the screen clean. Worse yet, pages
that _really_ want to get to you, so much that they
would use flash may also try other underhanded tricks
like hijacks, so going to IE for the vilest pages
is a questionable tactic, IMHO.
What's a ``google browser hijack''?
Yes, thats what I mean. Whenever I would go to google and search for whatever, the resulting page would look almost exactly like Google but was full of crap paid listings instead of the real ones. Oddly enough the address still said www.google.com and if I clicked next at the bottom to go to the next page it would go to the real Google results.
So it was a browser hijack that effected google.
SMOKE... are ya smokin yet?
If someone could just create an enable/disable button for cookies, javascript, and plugins, and put it on a toolbar that I don't have to make a half dozen clicks to get to, bother-free browsing would be so much easier.
They do make such a thing. It's called PrefBar and it's a mozilla plugin.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Doesn't work in my mozilla. One of my mozilla plugins, or maybe it's the version I'm using (1.7 RC1), keeps the mouse over popups from happening.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Several years ago I was excited about Flash usage in web sites. Now I think Flash is becoming something I won't want installed in the future.