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Firefox Improves Pop-Up Ad Blocking
BlakeCaldwell writes "The popular open-source browser already contains a pop-up blocker by default, but this does not handle pop-ups launched by plug-ins such as Flash and Java. Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler wrote in his blog last week that Mozilla developers are responding to the increasing number of advertisers that are using plug-ins to launch pop-up ads."
How soon til the pop-up ad companies find a way around this new blocked and Mozilla has to respond again, ...
Ah, just yesterday I was getting annoyed because I had seen three or four pop-under ads in less than a week.
Then I borrowed a friends machine with Internet Explorer. Wow! I had no idea how much crap Firefox was blocking!
How do people live with all of this garbage?
Three Squirrels
I think one of the unsong advantages of Open Source is it responds to user wants, even when those wants conflit with business wants. Cookie management, image and pop-up blocking, and other privacy protections would never have been initiated by M$.
Just my $.02.
not having Flash installed or Java enabled? How hard is that?
I'm always amazed at people who write in the Mozilla forums about the popups they are getting when using FF and my first question has always been: do you have Flash installed?
99.9% of the time the answer is yes.
Not sure why people think they need to have Flash installed since it's nothing but a resoure hog and rarely provides any extra benefit. As a poster the other day said, if I see the missing puzzle piece when I go to a site that means the site is using Flash and isn't a site I want to visit.
As far as java is concerned, it too is a resource hog and also provides little to no added benefit.
While the FF developers should be commended for their quick work on trying to beat down the horde of advertisers who think that an obnoxious popup is the way to get a message across, this issue is not a FF issue but a third party issue.
I run FF straight out of the box with no extensions and minor tweaks to the chrome file and I never, EVER, see any popups.
This just goes to show that the more crap people put on their systems the more things can go wrong.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate ads as much as anyone, but don't they pretty much fund most sites?
If the advertising companies ever cop on to the fact that many/most people never even see their ads, won't they drop them and leave unfunded?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Isn't the whole problem with popups (as with so many other annoying or outright malicious software) caused from a lack of diversity or genetic stock?
Nature teaches organisms this lesson often; do we all stampede toward the same vaccination which will eventually fail, or quietly, subtly change our composition to present more diverse ranks which are more difficult to break?
Do you mean ads or pop-up ads? I find the former usually ok and don't block them actively (and rather pay to get them removed if the site is worth it...) but IMHO there is no excuse to open windows (or tabs) in my browser I didn't request. The annoyance level is much much higher.
But it's not like the technologies can only be used for obnoxious means. Hooray for the flash game that'll kill 10 minutes here and there!
Not to mention that if FF wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream it needs to have the options that give it an edge (in this case, pop-up blocking) but support those technologies an average end-user expects from the web (rightly or wrongly!). Sitting their going "It's a third party issue!" is so much more damaging to the growth of FireFox than actually implementing a fix to work around that behaviour.
The more robust technology becomes, the more we allow creative people to do creative things with it, the more annoying some of those creative things are going to be. We can arbitrarily ban certain actions which we think are more exploitable than useful, and maybe thats even a good idea, until you try to write an interface that can't get the user's attention when it needs to because interfaces which can get attention are annoying when the attention is wasted and the machine can't tell the difference.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
When is Firefox going to have Adblock built in? I see it as an essential extension, but most people won't go out of their way to download extra extensions. It would not come with a preloaded Adblock list so most people would just block ads as they see them. Can anyone tell me why they don't do this? Seems to me this would greatly increase Firefox's popularity.
If adblocking isn't an option and a site plasters my desktop with 20 or so pop-ups, pop-unders, and various other deviltries that seriously demented webmasters burned the midnight oil thinking up then I'll be too annoyed to visit anyway. I don't bother blocking Google's text ads because they don't annoy the living crap out of me. That is the most advertisement that I'm going tolerate adblocking or no. Personally, I like the idea of sites that use obnoxious advertising strategies dying horrible deaths. But then, my favorite sites don't rely on obnoxious advertising methods for survival....could have something to do with why they're my favorites.
Although, this is simply an arms race, they'll come up with better popups. What would really be effective in the long run is site-specific javascript/images/plugins rules.
Put in a user-checkbox to:
1) disallow layering, or force items in different layers to be drawn at the bottom of the page, much like a word processor document page 2 is drawn below word processor document page 1 (this may be needed to preserve navigation items that are in the non-default layer).
2) disallow plugins from using screen space not reserved for them
The combination of the two will send a message to web design companies "don't even try this unless you want your web page to look bizzare on some customers' machines."
Granted, this could interfere with "good" things like menus that "floated" at the top of the page and other related items, but per-site and per-page exceptions will take care of this problem.
"Best viewed in any browser" is the idea web page for "general public" web sites anyways.
Too bad this is in the "easier said than done" category, but I hope someone or some group is up to the challenge.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
when you java turned off you don't get the java plug-in pop ups.
This is a test!
Are they also invisible, and not on the taskbar? Mine seem to be. If that's what the new popups are, I say bring 'em on.
PS, they're not under my browser. They're not anywhere. Drudge gives me no popups.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Sometimes I just wonder if it's more likely that Microsoft is just paranoid about being seen to stomp on others' business interests. Ad revenue for some businesses aside providing a decent popup blocker would almost certainly have driven at least several other companies out of business.
Several years of slackness have meant there are suddenly a lot of businesses in existance that profit on fixing gaps in Microsoft software, notably things that other Operating Systems tend to provide by default. For instance:
Whenever Microsoft does something to improve their products, someone's likely to be driven out of business because there are so many third party products out there that only exist to fill in Microsoft's shortcomings. Personally I think Microsoft is paranoid about bad press, and probably has an in-house policy to consider things very carefully before adding any bundled functionality that might be seen to clash with other established products.