Firefox Improves Pop-Up Ad Blocking 464
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."
Counter-counter-attack (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:5, Insightful)
All things are relative (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Just my $.02.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:2, Insightful)
How about. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I think it's great that they're working on this stuff and making the Internet that much less annoying. Every time the Mozilla team makes the blocker stronger, it makes it harder for the advertisers to get around it. I believe that eventually, we'll reach a point to where it won't be possible to get around the filter without explicit permission from the user. That would be very nice.
Shooting one's self in the foot? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're not installing flash because a few bad apples cause popup ads to appear, then you're totally missing out what Today's Net can do.
Say hello to the 1990's for me.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:5, Insightful)
It helps that Firefox, or sites where Firefox use is prevalent, tends to skew younger, a demographic web advertisers seek out.
Is another mass-vaccination the solution? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Is another mass-vaccination the solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
What would more diverse ranks be in this case? Using lots of different browsers, that impliment JavaScript in different incompatible ways?
Re:How about. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
simple, there's really one very good reason to have Flash installed:
Strong Bad [homestarrunner.com]
I just can't go on without my weekly fix of email snarkiness!
Re:well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:3, Insightful)
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?)
Insightful? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod Parent Up (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:5, Insightful)
Include Ablock (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, why use Flash then. Use C instead. With C, I can write full function apps that can destroy your computer, steal your information, use your IP in my Zomie hoards.
See, this is what is wrong with you flash heads. We know what you can do with Flash. What users are telling you is WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR SHITTY ANIMATIONS, VIDEO, OR SOUND. We want information, fast, in an accesible format. Flash is none of that.
I know, you are the UberFlashGod, and are the ONLY developer on the planet who makes Flash applications "the right" way. Funny that all of the fan boys talk about it, but I have yet to see ANY implementation that actually does it.
How can you NOT have flash installed
Its easy. When I visit a site, and get the message that "I must have Flash installed to view", I click "Fuck Off", and find the information somewhere else. Remember the whole point of the net (from the 1990's), unimpeded information flow? Well, Flash kind of makes that impossible.
Of course, there is no chance that your site is the only source of the information/product/service, so those of us who refuse to use Flash, go elsewhere. It's your loss, not ours, someone else gets our money.
If you're not installing flash because a few bad apples cause popup ads to appear, then you're totally missing out what Today's Net can do.
If you mean "waste your time watching some jackoffs attempt at making a superultratoocooltoobetrue animated intro to thier web site", then you are right. We are missing out on what todays web can do. By choice. One question, do you still use IE? Because hey, it is only a few bad apples that take advantage of those exploits too. Funny thing though, those "bad apples" don't seem to have nearly as many appologists here as the FlashAsses do. Wonder why?
When you reply, try to include ONE example of an actual benefit to using Flash. Remember a benefit. Not one of those stupid M$ Office style "features" that no one gives a shit about, yet cause a new version release every 18 months. An actual "I could not have done it any other way, and you will receive this benefit from (featureX)". Remember, I don't need imbeded video (I already have a TV, VCR, and DVD), or imbeded sound (I turn my speakers off, unless I am gaming).
The clock starts now, I'll check back in a week, and see if you could pull a single example out of your ass.
Re:well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've been testing it... (Score:2, Insightful)
The solution to this problem: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Shooting one's self in the foot? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Google has got it right on their Gmail service: I see links in a small pane off to the right side that are related to the subjects of the emails I am viewing. This has proven very useful to me, and I am not annoyed by flashing logos, sounds or other attempts to 'push' something I don't want.
Pop-ups take over your computer for the few seconds they are up - and if you add the thousands of pop-ups you have probably seen over the last year, it adds up to the advertisers stealing many hours (and thousands of mouse clicks) of your time (the time needed to deal with the pop-up/unders) without compensation to you.
Would a company allow me to come onto their premises and put up signs in their front lobby extolling the virtues of my hand-made 'chia-pets' (for sale - only $9.99)? No, they would not. Nor should we allow companies or thier proxies (in the case of ad agencies) to get away with essentially the same thing on our computers.
The big problem is ad agencies and businesses are stuck thinking that the new medium is just another television set - and the users are just a captive audience. They don't "get it" - and are trying to put the square peg called 'the internet' into the round hole of 'the television'. My computer is not a television and I am insulted when I go to a site that thinks otherwise.
The very best message we can give businesses on the web is to not frequent the sites that put thier marketing above the public's desire to find content that is useful to them.
Once upon a time, the internet was a place where you could do research and quickly find what you needed without the noise (in a communications sense) created by the advent of pop-up ads. Interestingly we see a parallel between the internet and cable TV. In the begining you payed premium prices for cable TV not just for the selection of channels, but also for the commercial-free content. Heck, if I wanted to see commercials I would just watch broadcast television, right? Then slowly but surely more and more commercials invaded cable TV. Not only am I paying a premium price for my cable service now, I am also getting bombarded, once again, by commercials! I am paying to see commercials!
With cable, I basically have two choices: I can watch the shows I wanted to watch and live with the commercials or stop watching the shows (I don't have a DVR - so don't go there). However, on the Internet I have an added choice: I can frequent other sites (many times non-commercial) that don't have the commercial pop-up ads. And this is what I do. This rewards those sites that put content over commericialism, and punishes those sites that don't. And don't get me wrong, I am not adverse to any advertising, but it needs to be subtle. The Google links I mentioned before are an excellent example of how this can be done right - and should serve as a model for other businesses on the internet.
If a business wants to have an internet 'presense', then they need to understand that entails not only pushing their product, but also providing some useful content to the internet community (in the form of online manuals to their products, reviews, and information about how the company is performing - maybe whitepapers of research they have done etc...). Of course, some will not want to publicize how bad they are, but I think the 'natural selection' of the web will cull the fly-by-night outfits out of the picture over time. In the end, providing the end user of the browser with the power to control what sites are allowed privileged access to their computer will only help the situation. The users of the internet are growing up, are more savvy and want tools that allow them to be less of a passive observer and more an active participant.
Re:I've been testing it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I've been testing it... (Score:3, Insightful)
PS, they're not under my browser. They're not anywhere. Drudge gives me no popups.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think so!
How about if someone comes into my house without my say so and puts stuff in the fridge, then demands payment?
Again - flawed business model. That does not mean we must bow down to such "businesses" and give them money, thats brutally absurd. Why in fact, I'm charging you fourty nine dollars ninety five cents to read my post.
NOW PAY UP!
Re:How about. . . (Score:1, Insightful)
That is one of the most astounding and enlightening statements I've ever heard.
Re:Counter-counter-attack (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I want the information, not the advertising.
Do I watch TV thinking "Oh wow! When is the next commercial coming on! Woohoo I can't wait!". No, I watch TV because I (ostensibly) like the programing. As more and more TIVOs/DVRs come online, inline advertising for tv programing will have to be replaced as a business model.
As for the other analogies, I *do* want my windshield clean, and I *do* want food in my fridge - but I don't want it done with bad "business" models either way. That means I want these things done on my schedule, at my convienence. Popups are certainly inconvienent - to say the very least.
The anaology I make is not so bad when you think about *control*. Who should control my windshield being cleaned? Me. Who should control my fridge getting stocked? Me. Who should control my web browser? Me. Not some damn podunk marketing "exec" who thinks that if they can "just get that image in front of that guy he will buy our product
Do you think spam is okay simply because you can hit the delete button?
Do you think drm is okay simply because you don't have to fork over the $$$ ?
It is about control.
And you can put popups galore on my screen when you pry my browser from my cold dead, hands!
I think it's more about legal battles (Score:3, Insightful)
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.