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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."
...and it seems to work very well so far. The sites I've noted that managed to get a popup through even with the normal popup blocker can no longer get them open.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
How soon til the pop-up ad companies find a way around this new blocked and Mozilla has to respond again, ...
In short, it doesn't work particulary well. However, adot has responded and says that those issues will be worked on.
Having suffered one of those "new generation" of pop ups only about 10 minutes ago, I look forward to seeing this functionality when it's in a more finished state.
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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.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/experimental/popupsdie/
This isn't really an update to the popup blocking code in Firefox, it makes the default preferences a little more aggressive.
In fact, it blocks all popups so that you have to manually whitelist the sites that use legitimate popups.
Fight plugins with plugins.i nfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows &category=Web%20Annoyances&numpg=10&id=433
For the 3 people who aren't aware of the Flashblocker extension yet.
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/more
Might not be the ideal solution who use alot of web applications rather than just surfing.
Here's a test popup/popunder link for Firefox using flash.
This is one of the reasons I chose Firefox, its stable, has tabbed browsing and keeps evolving..
The POP Up blocker is already pretty good, so much so that is scares the pants off me just how much crap I miss out on evertime i go to an old Windows box with IE 5 or 6 Vanilla installed.
Kudos to the Firefox developers and the community, developing a cross platform browser that was born to rock
-- Jim
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
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 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!
Here's a direct link to the extension.
I'm waiting for the patch/extension that allows me to turn off flash banners like I can turn off images.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
You could fix this a long time ago by going to about:config, and changing the value of privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins to "2". I started using this since I've heard of it, and it haven't seen a popup since. I think it's nice that they've enabled this by default, or made it more accessible. They should make more of the settings in about:config accessible in an easier way.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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
They are one stop shopping for blocking the junk that clutters the web.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
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
A very useful windows freeware(non-OSS) that acts as a local proxy server with custom filters to rewrite web sites on the fly on their way to the browser. All Filters are written in a reasonably potent filtering language and new ones can be written and added.
b tnG=Google+Search
Possibilities include:
- some popup blocking
- convert within-frame links to normal ones
- convert embedded flash animations or other plugins to clickable links
- modify header information (referrer, browser name,version , caching meta tags)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=proxomitron&
I wouldn't know. Did IE update with Service Pack 2?
I've been too busy using Firefox.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I had to deinstall it just after installation :(
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."); }
SitePoint
I'm shocked that so many people use Firefox, but not the Adblock extension. That's the first extension everyone on Earth should install, hell it should be integrated into Firefox!
What would more diverse ranks be in this case? Using lots of different browsers, that impliment JavaScript in different incompatible ways?
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.
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?
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.
flashblock or adblock
Integrating more robust Pop-Up blocking into Firefox makes good sense for the average persion.
The average person (the 87% still using IE) isn't up to tweaking the about:config or hunting down an Extension every time a new annoyance rears it's head. If Firefox is looking to take down IE, it needs to add integrate some features available in about:config or an Extension as defaults and/or directly into the Options menu.
I could not imagine expecting my Mom, or a project manager for that matter, to wrap their mind around an issue and then tweak about:config or find an Extension.
We are looking to take out IE, right?
I noticed a slight increase in the number of advertisements I see lately. It's up to a few per week, from zero.
/html/body/div#body/div#sponsor, and this would assume the #sponsor id is not variable.
I see two culprits, and this new popup blocking feature stops neither:
- Advertisers are steering clear of 'ad' and 'click' in their naming conventions, and some are even using their customers' image file or directory to display ads, in order to dodge host file-based and regexp-based ad blocking
- Floating DHTML divs are becoming widespread and are not blocked -- and probably cannot be blocked -- by current popup blocking techniques
Increasingly, setting the css display to none would be necessary for paths and sequences such as
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.
Firefox ALREADY HAD a popup blocker. What they borrowed from Microsoft was the top bar that allowed you to unblock a specific popup on runtime. Sometimes good ideas CALL to be borrowed (and thank God this one wasn't patented!)
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..
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com
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.