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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
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.)
If there's some way to disable java/javascript/plugins per-website, please let me know.