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The Return Of The Pop-Up Ad
SYFer writes "Shortly after upgrading my Macs to OS X 10.3.8, I noticed that I was getting pop-up ads on Safari. It had been so long since I'd seen a pop-up, I completely forgotten how annoying they can be. I went over to Apple's Support site to see if there was a relationship, but learned that the timing is just a coincidence (even though there's a lot of the usual FUD and flailing of arms in the discussion forums). In fact, it turns out that the pop-up advertisers (what's the proper denigrating term here?) have finally defeated the pop-up blocking functionality found in many browsers. MacFixIt is running a front page article on the topic and says 'Contrary to initial reports, this problem isn't limited to Safari; subsequent reports have noted pop-under ads victimizing a number of browsers that provide pop-up-blocking features, including the latest versions of Safari, FireFox, Mozilla, OmniWeb, and Camino.'"
...it's time for the return of my shotgun to active duty.
I tolerate text ads because something has to pay for the web, but popups and other abusive ads (like the huge flash ads in the slashdot TEXT ONLY service) just get blocked. The fuckwits deserve not to get any ad revenue for pulling stupid tricks like that.
Beep beep.
The Internet ad industry is causing an arms-race they won't be able to win. If the increasingly popular pop-up (or pop-under really in this case) blockers start getting defeated, that is just going to force the average browser user to start using a custom Hosts file of some kind to block nearly all ads. There isn't too much the ad industry can do about that, IMO, with the possible exception of making the ads come from the same server as the content. This will be okay for some sites, but I can't imagine too many people will want to give up that much control over their sites.
(But maybe that control is the ultimate plan of the ad industry - it would really make things easier on them...)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
I've recently seen popunder ads for GoToMyPC. Using Firefox 1.0. I was on quite a few sites at the time, so not sure which did it, but I did see a site: paypopup.com included in my history. My best guess is that the popunder was triggered by an onclick event over a hidden link (I often click a page in an empty spot to make sure it has the focus before wheel scrolling). I have some of the "move or resize windows" disabled, so I didn't even notice the popunder for a while, was hidden at the bottom right hand corner of the monitor. Only after I maximized that that I saw it was a GotomyPC ad.
There is a plugin that allows selective disabling of flash in Firefox. I just completely disable flash myself; I don't go to any sites that need it (thankfully, the trend of flash-only sites, which hit its peak in 2001 or so, is going away).
It's my understanding that Mozilla was designed with 20/20 hindsight, and got rid of all the ways that websites annoyed users through IE. It's just that the advertisers were a bit more resourceful than I would have thought, and managed to pull a new rabit out of their hat just for non-IE users. I've been seeing popups with Firefox for a couple months on certain sites, and now on a few others as well. Interestingly, if I use IE for those same sites, I get a other popups, but I don't get the ones that I was getting under Firefox.
Anyway, I'm not too concerned. I don't doubt that an update or plugin will be made soon to stop even these, if one's not already out and I just haven't noticed.
No, that's even better. It prevents you from accidentally not boycotting the stupid site that's using them.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I've also recently encountered more pop-ups in Mozilla and at first attributed it to the Macromedia Flash plugin. The following page from Hindustan Times (often linked from news.google.com) puts up a pop-up ad that is quite effective -- centered and blocks most of the content such that you have to move it or click it or close it (no chance to have it pop-under). See it/slashdot it here:
Gurinder Chadha believes Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth!
Linux at home
I sent them a brief email: I received an email from them soon after that they had sent to their advertising partner, TribalFusion:
Needless to say, I was very impressed, am browsing Macslash again, and have yet to see any more of these pop-ups.
-Paul
A not-terribly-computer-savvy friend of mine is having problems with his AOL email.
So I suggested he sign up for Yahoo mail, because all the people I know who use it find it perfectly satisfactory.
He can't get signed up for Yahoo mail. I tried coaching him step by step over the phone. I can't be 100% certain of what's happening, but as I followed through the same steps on my own browser, he ran into troubles at exactly the point when Yahoo popped up a confirmation screen on my browser.
I'm about 95% sure he has popup blocking enabled and that's what's preventing him from signing up with Yahoo.
Of course, he doesn't know what a popup blocker is, or how to control it.
So, these days there are probably users who are suffering both from the new popups and from incompatibilities caused by the use of popup blockers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think the workaround is a FF extension that create a button on your toolbar to mark a site as blacklisted (or whitelisted), then have a central database so everyone who has that extension installed benefits when one person marks a site as such.
If you find that somebody erroneously marked a site as blacklisted then you whitelist it and eventually the good guys out vote anybody who's trying to do another site harm.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Popup blockers are becoming standard issue. As a result, circumventing popup blockers is primarily to get to those people who could have been sucked in by a pop-up ad had they not run Windows Update and gotten SP2 auto installed.
Secondly, it might be the advertising services or the pages that host these ads that are trying to bypass blockers. The advertisers probably realize that people who go out of their way to block ads won't every buy anything, but many sites with ads or web ad providers just care about the impression count, not their click through rate.
http://brandonbloom.name
Konqueror supports whitelisting sites for java/javascript access. The latest version even supports whitelisting sites that can use plugins. I think Omniweb supports that as well if you also have Macs. Another great feature is that user_agent spoofing in Konqueror is per site rather than a global setting like Opera/Firefox.
People who state that they don't want to see ads are traditionally considered to be the most profitable to advertise too. The logic has been that the person attempts to avoid being sold something because he/she KNOWS that they're too weak to say no to a good sell. The same logic, theoretically, holds true for people blocking web ads... hence the effort to get around pop-up and ad blockers.
The being said, I love my pop-up and ad blocking.
--
RumorsDaily
No, you just don't go to the right sites to see this shit. Try going to http://www.spacedaily.com/ and observe absolute insane shit that FireFox still allows random web sites to do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Many years ago in my misspent youth, I failed at selling encyclopedias. We would go to struggling working class neighborhoods and try to snow these people into thinking their kids would be educationally incapacitated unless they spent more money on a set of encyclopedias than their car was worth. The point of all this is that many of these homes had "no solicitors" signs which, as my trainer pointed out, were to be considered engraved invitations for encyclopedia salespeople. See, people with those signs often had a hard time saying no and they hoped the signs would protect them from having to do so. I suspect the same thing is going on with webvertisers.
I found this whole thing morally reprehensible and ended up quiting after a week and no sales.
Actually, thats a good point. Make it a policy to click on the ad. Every time. Do it.
The site has to pay ad revenue per-click, right? Not per purchase?
plz, it's wonderful.
now if only someone will remake the badger song with the popup for hormel in it.
p.s. please dont sue me hormel.
Not to reply to myself, but, after further investigation, I have some more info. The script that it links to has a function called ffPop, which probably stands for firefox popup. This function does a document.write of an embed tag pointing to a swf file. http://cdn.fastclick.net/fastclick.net/ffp.swf That file, when loaded, will make firefox have a popup window. Maybe this will lead to having these popups blocked in future versions of firefox
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Pop up blockers are security feature...anyone who writes a program that deliberately circumvents a security is liable under the DMCA. Anyone who distributes code that does the same thing is also liable.
If the corporate boys are going to screw us using the DMCA why cant we do the same thing?
True. Text Ads don't annoy me but popups and banners do. Incidentally, while I have been getting some popups in Konqueror I haven't gotten any on Firefox. I think that Adblock takes care of many of those nasties since I've been blocking all kinds of images and scripts from evil advertiser sites. I think the great genius of Google (however they may haver turned later) is to have understood that the non agressive ads are more likely to be tolerated. Animations are the worst. And what to say about those floaty frames that are not windows but are always in the way. They are the ones that made sure that Adblock is the first Extension I get.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
I agree The only way to stop this kind of thing is to stop them from making money. Its also why I will not buy DVD's or Music CD's Becuse of the RIAA and MPAA. They sould not make money.
Penguin Follower has it right. This works for me; but there is another factor.
Go to the children's sites (porn, games, sports, entertainment, ad nauseum) and you will have no end of marketing technology blasted at you.
Go to adult sites (corporations, universities, respected publishers, etc) and you will enjoy relative freedom from that foolishness. Why, it's just like the real world!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Setting 'browser.block.target_new_window' to true in about:config seems to work, I haven't noticed any.
That isn't the only way advertisers are getting around popup blockers. This only applies to FireFox, as it's all I use:
There's an element called dom.popup_allowed_events in about:config, which has stuff like 'submit click dblclick' etc.
One website that's nefarious for insufferable ads (zophar.net) recently added code to make clicking legitimate links trigger popup ads. My solution was to remove all allowed popup events by making dom.popup_allowed_events = ""
Yeah, it'll probably break a few poorly written image galleries; but if everyone starts doing this, maybe people will stop thinking its OK to pop open new windows to show images.
This method should still allow target="_blank" tags to work in hyperlinks, but has its own problems as well. For what it's worth, I also have not seen any popup ads since doing this.
In the back of my mind I keep thinking there was a law on the books about people taking control of a computer without the users consent. Now it seems to me that circumventing a pop up blocker to open a new window violates this law and the advertiser and possibly the website could be held liable.
I know this law is on the books maybe someone could point it out.
If I set an option to block popups in my browser and a website circumvents that option, is it breaking DMCA?
I am right there with you. I'm sorry, but there just aren't any websites that are so important to me that I feel the need to beg for bullshit by turning on a bunch of pointless features.
The very concept of a pop-up blocker is stunning to anybody who has been using the web since before Javascript became common. (To say nothing of the folks who have been using the Internet since before it had websites on it!) I can think of very few features that were so bad that users begged for ways to prevent the feature from being used... And said feature wasn't removed from the product!
Can you imagine if car makers started including bombs in all their cars, and you had to get or make a special explosion-blocker? You'd think that it would occur to the manufacturer to just not install the bomb, rather than working on the ultimate explosion blocker!
I'm using more exclamations points than is my habit, but only because I find the situation so excrutiatingly baffling. If, in IE6, MS had simply not bothered to include the code to open new windows automatically, the world would be a better place, and few people would have felt the need to switch to better browsers. Any sane web designer has come to realise that their user's hate popups. Further, any sane web designer has to deal with the fact that their 'legitimate' popups are likely to be blocked. Thus, any sane web developer should just stop using popups as part of the actual site, so all popups can be assumed ads, and we can just abandon the feature entirely.
To quote Mr. Jeff Foxworthy's guide to UI design... When you have features that make front page news when they get used, because your users hate those features so vehemently, you might be a bloat-peddler.
A silly bit of sophistry, but they can get really worked up about it. If you have a high resistance to righteous anger then follow one of their forums for a couple days to get some insight into how they think.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I try to give a message to advertisers, by not blocking Google Ad's. Yes, they are ad's, and they are not annoyance free, but they are SO much better then flashy GIF's or Flash animations or pop-up-under-over-around windows, that I'm willing to put up with them in the hope that advertisers will notice they are more effective at reaching their audience, and switch.
Knowing advertisers though, its a forlorn hope. Should they notice they are more effective, they will just start using plain-text ads AS WELL AS their existing annoying techniques.
No site should *require* Javascript.
True. But:
1. It would only make a difference if you could convey your above statement to the site designers of all the sites you browse enough time in advance of your browsing of the said sites that they would actually understand that their site is broken and fix it.
2. Javascript allows some sites to work faster. My bank is an example: filters and other commands that change the view of the data don't require any interaction with the server at all, so they are instantaneous. Without javascript every command means loading a page, which makes a noticable difference even for small pages.
Actually, animations aren't the worst.
There's two that are tied for worse:
Those ones that play a sound. It's really annoying when you have two different java ads playing some sound. But here you are trying to read a page, and unless you turn your speakers off or something, you have an engine or something running.
The second are the 'fake popups', that are really obvious for me because they mimic the default windowsXP theme, which I don't even use at work (where I HAVE to use WXP & IE). They 'float' over the text you're trying to read.
I don't read AC A human right
I was thinking this myself, but I realise that now with browser integration of popup blockers (even in IE), people aren't necessarily explicitly choosing to block popups anymore. I assume the advertisers figure that some of the people blocking popups are only doing so because it was on by default in their browser, and if they can get around that, they can sell to these people.
The corollary would be that if specific popup blocker applications that need to be actually installed by the user used different methods to block popups, the advertisers would theoretically not try to stop these. I'm wondering if these popups will still get around Pop-Up Stopper, actually - it uses a much more no-nonsense strategy for stopping popups (ie, you cannot open any browser windows at all beyond the first one unless you're holding Ctrl or Shift - I've simply gotten used to that instead)
Advertisers take note.
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
Damnit slashdot stripped out my script tag even in plain text! Go to snopes and view source for the page and you'll see:
c gi/v=2.0S/sz=468x60A|728x90A/'+rnum+'/RETURN-CODE/ JS/"></scr'+'ipt>');
document.write('<scr'+'ipt src="http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/ad1874c.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Nothing using adblock and Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050221 Firefox/1.0+ (today's trunk build).
I did notice a popup the other day using adblock & 1.0+dfsg.1-2 (Debian package with Gecko/20050110).
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
The browser has to do a number of things and call and API function to open a new window. Is it that hard to make it check and see if the window request comes from me clicking on a link?
My website uses pop-ups for viewing images (here's an example post; left-click the images to view them). I used to have regular links directly to the images, but felt it was actually more annoying that way. I, for one, prefer having a pop-up sized to exactly fit the image; when I'm in 1600x1200 resolution, viewing a 640x480 image, I appreciate it not taking up the entire screen, as a new tab or window would do. Anyway, do you agree I've used them legitimately, or do you think even this sort of thing should be done without pop-ups?
~CGameProgrammer( );
javascript.enabled = false
My favourite way of blocking bullshit. If the site doesn't work this way I'll either bitch the webmaster for writing buggy pages or simply vote with my feet. In most cases don't even need to waste my precious brainpower in deciding what to boycott. If it doesn't work, it's probably broken -> neext please.
Actually it's not Firefox that allows it, but it's a third party plugin you yourself installed.
How the hell can you expect Firefox to block code that you yourself CHOSE to install, code that is provided by a third part??
On the bright side, Firefox DOES have mechanisms for blocking this stuff in this case: just use the adblock plugin.
The only proper way to solve this problem is to complain to MacroMedia, whose software you chose to run even though it allows this kind of "absolutely insane shit", (or even better, deinstall their evil software).
In August of last year, I made this demo, which shows how to easily popup a full-size page. This is done by submitting a form on onLoad, which targets a new frame. Works in Safari, but not in Firefox.
http://tom.lightheadsw.com/etc/safaripopup.html
Sig Nature
Frankly I don't think that the people who make these ads are trying to circumvent the protection methods in Firefox and Safari, since those two account for a very very small percentage of the browser market. The more likely explanation is that the advertisers have come up with a way to block the SP2-instigated IE popup blocker, since that was the bane of advertisers since it was added in the Summer. So, now we have a method of popups that is getting around the IE popup blocker, and because of these new methods, is probably getting around Firefox and Safari's blockers as well. The most obviously geeky explanation that FF And Saf are being targeted might not be the right one! They're still better browsers anyway though. Kind of sad to see I cant say "Hey, I can just turn on popup blocking to stop that ad.... oh wait...."
A week ago I had problems getting Firefox to close.
Turns out some site had opened a popup window offscreen. I tried to adblock the contents from - wonder what it was - 888.com or something.
Thank heavens that it opened offscreen. Otherwise I might have actually seen the popup. (What's the point of opening popups offscreen anyway? I just got spam that was titled "Do not read this" or something like that.)
The thing is, bad advertising is almost as effective as good advertising. Why, and how? Well, if you see an advertisement, be it good or bad, you'll remember it. Especially if it annoys you. However, a few months down the track you won't remember that it was bad; all you remember is the name and brand.
Then if you walk down a shop, and see different brands-which are you more likely to buy? One which was advertised, and so you've heard of before-even if it was bad advertising.