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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."
This is why I like to use FF. The rate of change from the devs is so much faster than most other browsers. (Opera may be better, I don't know, I never use it, I don't like the ads) Pop-ups are starting to bother FF users, so the Mozilla guys start to sort it out. Well done guys, and thanks.
I use adblock and don't see popups. Can someone give an example site where someone is getting around the popup blocking? It may be that I don't visit such sites, or it might be that I've configured adblock in such a way that the popups get blocked by that. In any case, I'd like to test this.
Can anyone provide a link?
Thanks!
But I have hardly any trouble with popups.
Maybe I don't go to the sort of sites that use them? Maybe I've just filtered those sites out of my brain?
I don't know but the only sites I see popups on are Sciam.com and NewScientist.com
Others might do it but I never notice.
However, I do get pissed off with those floating flash ads which hover over the body of the page. Those are f*cking everywhere these days.
If FF blocks those reliably then I'd be tempted to swap.
Pete
PrefBar lets you change your settings. I use it to filter out most flash, animations, JS and Java - then tick them when I need them. Combine that with Flashblock and Adblock and you've got a useful browser.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Remember that 5% is still 1 in 20 visitors, advertisers still care about these kinds of numbers and will try to get around it.
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
Ads fund most sites, but all ads aren't pop ups. If Firefox was to include adblock as default with a large configuration file for it I'd probably agree with you (to a certain extent anyway), but this just blocks pop-ups which are among the most annoying ads on web sites (only more annoying I can think of is the ones which make noises and don't have a mute button).
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Internet Explorer did; FireFox "borrowed" the concept.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Popup blocking does not stop ads on webpages, you can put all the banner ads any advertiser can want. You just cant force my browser to open windows.
Lets get this straight...
NO WEB AUTHOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING OUTSIDE THE WEB PAGE ITSELF.
Whether it is cookie, a popup, or whatever. The web page owners right to control what I view ends at the borders of the web page. Any website owner who uses code to deliberately bypass my popup blocker is hacking my web browser and I should be able to prosecute both the web page owner(as an accessory) and the person who put the code in there. Is that clear enough?
There's nothing wrong with putting business interests first, as long as customers have the option to go elsewhere.
It's only when you can't "vote with your feet" to punish a company for stupid decisions that really serious problems arise.
This is the essense of the problem with MS. Not that they are a business, but that they have a monopoly. And the goodness of The Mozilla Foundation is not that they are non-profit, but that they are trying to offer a viable alternative to one part of the monopoly.
What if the browser rendered a small popup notifier in the corner of suspicious divs, which you could then click on to mark that div an ad. Using an xpath expression to point to the div, you could probably accurately identify it most of the time, even if it didn't have an id attribute.
Some problems would be expiring page content (if the page changes, the marked div could become a valid one), and the fact that this alters the display of some web pages.
Another idea might be to have a centralized blacklist/whitelist of popups (incl. div ads), and have an optional setting to turn this on in Firefox's preferences. Then when people happen upon popups, they could be added to the list, and if they permit them they could be whitelisted. Or vice versa with the div ads, since you can't assume all divs are ads.
There are many problems with this idea as well, but for people who want to err on the side of strict blocking, it might not be a bad idea. It might send a message to advertisers too -- that we consider popups to be the web page equivalent of spam.
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You mean like Adblock?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Or maybe, just maybe, there were already dozens of popup blockers written by 3rd parties available for IE for years.
I use IE exclusively and haven't seen a pop-up ad (flash or otherwise) for over 3 years.
i tried this new extension by going to http://www.popuptest.com/goodpopups.html and noticed that although it is very good at blocking unwanted popups, it doesn't work so well with popups that i would like to click. (by clicking on them) it still didn't work when i clicked on 'show this popup' on the firefox status bar..
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