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."

Comments

Counter-counter-attack

[hey]

How soon til the pop-up ad companies find a way around this new blocked and Mozilla has to respond again, ...

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[TheRealFixer]

At least, thankfully, Mozilla DOES respond. How many years did it take for IE to finally even get pop-up blocking?

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[The-Bus]

To me, it DOES mean they are worried. Not long after Firefox 1.0 the js popups started appearing. Had they not been so concerned, we still to this day wouldn't require popups.

It helps that Firefox, or sites where Firefox use is prevalent, tends to skew younger, a demographic web advertisers seek out.

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[Entropy]

The morality of blocking pop ups?

How fscking assinine is that question???

What about the morality of throwing shit in your face that you don't want?

Because thats exactly what popups are, is throwing stuff at you.

If your business model requires pissing off customers, get a new model, cripes!!

(Oh, just as a curious aside, if you do not read at -1 you're a hypocrite aren't you?)

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[happymedium]

Absolutely correct... and IE could have had a popup blocker all along; it's not like it would be hard for MS to code. So why didn't they? Probably because they believed in the ridiculous philosophy that intrusive popups are a legitimate source of ad revenue. It was, or should have been obvious to them what their consumers wanted, but MS being a business (unlike the Mozilla Foundation), put business interests first. This is the same reason that Windows Media Player is loaded with DRM. MS only caved on the popup blocking issue because FF, which included blocking by default, started gaining market share as IE's reputation tanked. Self-interest alone drives IE's development, whereas FOSS developers tend to actually care about the people who use their programs.

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[Gannoc]

I was wondering about the morality of blocking pop-ups

If 99% of the pop-ups I saw weren't deceptive spyware installs or trying to get me to get a "free" ipod/razr/whatever, I might agree with you.

All things are relative

[rueger]

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?

I love the FireFox's teams responsiveness

[quirk3k]

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.

Shooting one's self in the foot?

[CleverNickedName]

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?

Re:How about. . .

[CoffeeJedi]

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.

simple, there's really one very good reason to have Flash installed:
Strong Bad

I just can't go on without my weekly fix of email snarkiness!

Re:well

[djpig]

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.

Insightful?

[SFA_AOK]

I can understand that not everybody wants Flash and Java functionality when browsing the web. I hate sites that are all flash.

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.

Include Ablock

[hass]

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.

The solution to this problem:

[davidwr]

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.