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Why Your Pop-Up Blocker Doesn't Work Anymore
An anonymous reader writes "If you've noticed that pop-up ad windows seem to have made an unwelcome return into your life, it's because they're not using the same easily blockable technology as before. The Adimpact system uses DHTML to annoy you, and there's no immediate prospect of a solution."
What popups?
This mostly popup free browsing experience brought to you by the makers of Firefox and NoScript.
FYI, I've yet to find one of these which I suspect is because in addition to running AdBlock Plus, I also regularly use NoScript. The combination of the two swats 99% of ads of all kinds, and completely kills any popups unless I specifically enable them on a site.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Check out http://dhtmlpopups.webarticles.org/ for a quick set of examples of these.
It looks like a bit of experimentation could yeild a reasonably reliable greasemonkey script to kill these when not click initated.
Spyder
I've been using a hosts file since around 2003. It blocks out all those ads, popups, spyware,adware, stops alot of virii from calling home, you name it. I scan my computer about once a month, and I haven't had any of the 'serious outbreaks' of adware like all my friends. They all swear by their software programs to block it(ultimately, they always end up reformatting when they cant quite get rid of them all) but my solution uses no resources and doesn't require 'scanning' for them regularly.
I use it on my parent's computer and only update it once a year at Christmas. Even with only updating once a year they haven't gotten any adware/spyware yet, and it's been 3 years.
I highly recommend it. Give it a try, there's nothing to lose but the crapware.
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
The firefox noscript extension doesn't permanently block javascript - it informs you when a site is trying to use javascript and gives you the choice to allow it temporarily or trust it completely.
It is actually quite interesting to see the number of cross site scripts that are called in lots of websites. So you have complete control over that. It is not flat blocking it out...
Why was he moderated "FlameBait?"
I think we need more meta-moderation, and people that get unmodded ought to get fewer mod privileges (if that's not already how it works). Unbelievable.
Anyway, I don't disable it... what annoys me is every few days there's an "update" whose sole purpose, IMO, is to keep NoScript at the top of the popularity list, and then when you do upgrade, it automatically loads the NoScript page in Firefox when it finally starts up. I often just click to skip installing the upgrade, but that gets tedious, too.
I very rarely encounter pages where it's not obvious which script I need to allow, although it certainly does happen.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
FYI, I've yet to find one of these which I suspect is because in addition to running AdBlock Plus, I also regularly use NoScript.
Adblock is great for fine-grained filtering of sites. I use it fairly sparingly, since I maintain a large hosts file to kill traffic with any server I find to be suspect. NoScript works, but I just find it too intrusive to be my weapon of choice. But my combo kills nearly all traffic I don't want to see...
How is NoScript instrusive? You set it to block by default, and if you hit a site that doesn't work correctly, test it with the "Temporarily allow..." option for all the relevant parts of the site, then you can whitelist it permanently if you wish. Kudos to your hosts file -- different strokes for different folks, and all that jazz. However, I just can't see how NoScript can be called intrusive by anyone.
Method of processing duck feet
To make NoScript less intrusive, try configuration options. For example, 'temp allow top-level sites by default' is good for seeing most of what you want, without seeing what you don't (ad content from another site). Of course, more risky for users blindly following pr0n links to sites where even the top level is dangerous.
But then again, I'm sure you don't do that, eh?
While we're on the subject, Redirect Remover is worth a look too...