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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.
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 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!
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.
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)