Slashdot Mirror
Floaters are the New Pop-Ups
windowpain writes "A prior Slashdot article discussed the ever-increasing ability of pop-up ads to break through adblocking software. Now the New York Times (registration required) is reporting that pop-ups are pooped out, replaced by those annoying "floaters" that are even more resistant to conventional pop-up blocking software. From the article: 'Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated. In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.'"
With Mozilla/Firefox these new ads are actually not a problem. Just use a userContent.css file to block them.
For example, I found some that use divs with IDs, so I just added something like:
div#GF__p_0,
div#floatpop { display: none !important;}
And, poof, they're gone. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to block, but the Webdeveloper extension can help quite a bit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/technology/circu its/24popp.html?ex=1266987600&en=22bde7cc89dd70a5& ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
No Registration Link
I guess the question is if something like AdBlock can filter out these without getting a lot of false positives, making the browser render of a lot of pages incorrectly.
Martin
The legitimate, non-advertising uses of these things are so limited (at least, compared to pop up windows), that the ad-blocking software will catch up with them in no time, and most people will lose nothing by deactivating the appropriate bits of javascript.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.
In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.
The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.
To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, "This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across."
But as with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: they get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - www.msn.com, www.msnbc.com and Hotmail - followed by espn.com and www.yahoo.com.
Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and www.msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)
"We want to do something that's informative and entertaining as opposed to being annoying," said Joanne Bradford, vice president and chief media revenue officer for msn.com. "That's our guiding principle." To that end, the company introduced on Feb. 1 a design that limited the number of ads on the main page. (Ms. Bradford would not say by how much.) The action, she noted, did prompt "a little bit of squawking" from advertisers.
Some are trying to figure out other ways to stop the onslaught. Mozilla, designer of the popular (and free) Web browser Firefox, which offers a pop-up blocker, is trying to block floater ads as well, but has so far been unsuccessful, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "It really is an arms race," he said.
Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media, a company that sells advertising for more than 2,000 Web sites, said that even though he is a fan of the "rich media" ads, he warns that advertisers should understand that they cannot deluge people with the technology without consequence. "Just because you can do it doesn't make it a smart thing to do," he said.
Many of those floaters are created using flash, so use Flashblock to prevent them from showing.
Flashblock and AdBlock == good surfing experience.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
This time, the non-membership Slashdot version seeems to be:
Brilliant!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Get this extension and be happy:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Flash animations show as buttons until you click on them.
Ciao, Renato
I haven't had it installed lately because my adblock does a pretty good job of blocking flash that I don't want to see, but
flashblock is what I used to use... it blocks out flash until you click on it to view.
dhtml z-index?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It already happens. You're watching a TV show and suddenly a swirling logo appears in a corner and then an ad for another show on that network appears. And then during the closing credits, the network will break in with obnoxious promos that block out anything you can see or hear on screen.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
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.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Sorry, the link above should be this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdotters may not be thrown off by the "fake windows" popups, especially when using other operating systems, but most people are. My wife has many times said things like, "Oh no - we have a virus" or "there's something wrong with our internet connection" when seeing one of those fakeware popups. She's probably installed spyware because of it too.
Adblock can also kill the floater by preventing it loading. (I prefer "floater" as its alternative meaning in British is that of a turd in water)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I'm no developer and I don't usually peeked into webpages code, but I guess that the "nexgen" of add blockers should "sniff" all the javascript passed to the browser(s) and sort it out if its an popup/floater/whatever piece of garbage or if it's something actualy usefull for the browsing.
To sum it up: Opera (javascript off), then Firefox, then (gasp!) IE.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
They haven't even activated the update service yet. They are waiting for a few days until the manual downloaders are done swamping the servers.
Source:
I do agree with you in most part, and am unsure why you would get modded down. However.. many of those 'floaters' originate from external sites through banner ads placed on the site, which then 'breaks' out of the banner space and interrupts your browsing of the original site.
This tends to happen because ads are 'inlined' rather than iframed, to prevent adblockers and such, and therefore can happily slap layers all over the whole browser window.
If there were an option to turn those layers off, Id certainly use it, I havent seen it used for anything other than ads, and popping up dialogs in hotmail perhaps?.
Im sure there are a few sites which use layers for laying out content legitametly, but Id rather they choose a different design or require to be put on a white list than put up with content flashing about my screen over what Im trying to read.
I.O.U One Sig.
Problem is that your taught in school that you have to grab the consumers attention, that pretained mostly to TV ads because people are sitting there vegetating on the couch, you need to shake them out of their stupor.
dude, it's in adblock!
you can block scripts as well as iframes for the page from the little adblock menu in the lower right.
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.
Something similar has been a part of my IE Stuff pack for a while now. I consider it invaluable.
http://www.jordanmills.com/odds.asp
funny munging
Avoiding flash. If you ue FireFox. For example edit C:\Documents and Settings\user.name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.nsy\chrome\u serContent.css
Translation: zero flash - zero iframe - no exception. May be a little too drastic.
Personaly I don't beleive in viability of adding a little rule from time to time for such and such add which makes it's way through. I am lazy: no feature = no problem.
On a more general aspect It is quite concerning to see abuse of "floating" stuff because this one, we won't be able to filter... Yes, I believe it's a question of day advertising site will proxy to advertisers, so we won't be able to filter urls, or ip's. Supposing divs are named, we could filter on names ? Arg: the advertising site will mangle it's own legtimate div's name just to let adv divs goes through.
I am afraid there won't be solution but to turn off JavaScript completely... Once again we'll have the conclusion no feature = good feature. The lynx evengelist may have the ultimate answer. Aaarg!
For advertisers. Please just have nice text adv on the side of the page. ( no blink, flash, move, ...). Just 5 words bold + 10 words descr. I don't care of this one. But there is more: because I don't find them annoying I read them ( some of them). But wait there is more: I even clicked recently on one.
Z.
These new "floater" ads can be stamped out if you have the right functionality in the web browser itself.
:-) I wonder why Mozilla 1.7.x and Firefox 1.x doesn't offer this level of blocking control without having to do a lot of manual configuration with third-party add-ons.
I'm currently running MySoft Technology's Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) shell program for Internet Explorer 5.x and later, which has a very powerful function called AD Hunter. AD Hunter not only blocks mostly pop-up windows, but also the vast majority of "floating" ads, Flash animated ads, a large number of online static ads and even allows you to block ActiveX objects!
I don't know why these people submit reg-free links to nytimes... guess some people never learn.
Anyway, here's the article text:
IF you happened upon nj.com in the last month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
On the Web, the floater's time has come.
Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.
In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.
The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.
To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, "This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across."
But as with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: they get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - www.msn.com, www.msnbc.com and Hotmail - followed by espn.com and www.yahoo.com.
Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and www.msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)
"We want to do something that's informative and entertaining as opposed to being annoying," said Joanne Bradford, vice president and chief media revenue officer for msn.com. "That's our guiding principle." To that end, the company introduced on Feb. 1 a design that limited the number of ads on the main page. (Ms. Bradford would not say by how much.) The action, she noted, did prompt "a little bit of squawking" from advertisers.
Some are trying to figure out other ways to stop the onslaught. Mozilla, designer of the popular (and free) Web browser Firefox, which offers a pop-up blocker, is trying to block floater ads as well, but has so far been unsuccessful, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "It really is an arms race," he said.
Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media, a company t
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I've been using opera forever because of the quickness with which I can resolve the problem.
If I hit a site with one of these pop ups I hit the following keys. F12 -> u -> F5. Done.
When I get time I'll look into writing macros that do the same thing for firefox.
-Nuke the moon
Go to http://www.lashampoo.net/unix/stopADVbanners.css.t xt and copy and paste the entire page into a text editor. Save and install (instructions are in the file, commented out with the usual #). This version I have is much older than this link but I've added a few urls to it so it's still working for me fine.
Kills most ads dead, including flash and other "popovers". You can edit it to your liking to include more blocked hosts anytime. Works with most browsers and most OS's.
If you use OSX/Safari, go to Window: Activity to view the urls of every item on any page, including the ones this CSS blocks and of course the ones that might get past from time to time. Add them as required by editing the text file.
Other OS's/browsers may have a similar ability (not just view source, although it does help sometimes to do that) but you will have to check that out yourself or perhaps if someone knows they could reply to this post and let us all in on it.
I have noticed a few sneak by once every few weeks, but for the most part it's working good for me and has for years. Add new offenders as they are discovered and it's pretty simple and painless.
Occasionally you will find a page where you need to view a button that is blocked (eg the "Download" button for Shockwave 10 won't show up with this enabled) so just disable temporarily and use as if you were John Q Public. Most of the time it doesn't affect "normal" content at all, or put another way I don't miss whatever I'm not seeing in the least.