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."

A refreshing change...

[Moby Cock]

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.

This is why I chose Firefox

[jamesjw]

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

Example of these popups? I need to test adblock

[SuperficialRhyme]

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!

Pop-ups.

[Pants75]

I use IE exclusivly. *Please don't hit me*

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

STOP: it blocks even legitimate popups

[incuso]

I had to deinstall it just after installation :(

Prefbar lets you ignore most of the crap

[bbtom]

PrefBar [mozdev.org] 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.

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[davidmcw]

Remember that 5% is still 1 in 20 visitors, advertisers still care about these kinds of numbers and will try to get around it.

Re:Shooting one's self in the foot?

[NetNifty]

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).

Re:ummm..

[delus10n0]

Internet Explorer did; FireFox "borrowed" the concept.

Re:For those to lazy to read the blog

[Jugalator]

No, I think he actually meant popupsdie, the recent one from Mozilla that this article is about. I think the difference between FlashBlock and that one is that FlashBlock requires you to either actively maintain whitelists or take actions to display flash at all, while popupsdie just silently blocks popups opened by plugins, and doesn't impact other Flash behavior. So there's a difference there. Probably for a reason too, otherwise they'd just recommended the already existing FlashBlock for everyone.

Also, popupsdie isn't really much of an extension; you can do what it does by adding/changing two settings in about:config.

From MozillaZine:
The value of privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins is changed to 2, meaning that plugins are not allowed to open new windows, and the value of dom.popup_allowed_events is changed to an empty string, which stops all Web page events (such as clicks and form submissions) from launching popups. This means that some user-initiated popups (the type you generally want) may now be blocked. There are also reports that the extension breaks the ability to open blocked popups from the yellow bar or popup blocker Status Bar icon. You can still whitelist sites that you wish to allow to use popups.

Baloney Re:well

[voss]

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?

What about the average person?

[DanCentury]

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?

It will not stop floating DHTML divs

[Kergan]

I noticed a slight increase in the number of advertisements I see lately. It's up to a few per week, from zero.

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 /html/body/div#body/div#sponsor, and this would assume the #sponsor id is not variable.

Re:How about. . .

[beejay54]

As a student web developer I must say I'm shocked to read that! Fact is, if your one of those guys who surfs the web with no flash plug-in and javascript disabled your just asking for an unpleasant experience. Despite what most people think, those features are pretty important to an interface designer and the ad community is screwing over the legitimate web dev community all the time by forcing the browser makers to cut javascript functionality.

My final portfolio (what I will be using to get a job) is flash based (it was a requirement) and how exactly can I show off my web projects without launching them in another window? hmm? Maybe I should direct that one to the boys at doubleclick but seriously, I'm tired of spending hours on workarounds for something that the ad community has screwed up. For guys like you I've coupled my flash portfolio with a nice XHTML valid companion site but I do flash and thats all potential employers care about seeing. Thanks doubleclick!

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[blackbear]

...but MS being a business (unlike the Mozilla Foundation), put business interests first.

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.

Re:It will not stop floating DHTML divs

[lux55]

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.

Re:All things are relative

[tehcrazybob]

I was doing computer work for my aunt's church not too long ago. The church has a computer lab, open to the public. As I was sitting in the lab, working on a computer in the corner, a couple of little kids, maybe 7 years old, came running in to use a computer. I heard one of them, a little girl, say to the other, "Go to Internet Explorer. The blue one."

It made me sad. I remember thinking that they would be confused if I took IE away from them. It's not a really big deal, since the computers are fully patched and generally work pretty well.

Then again, maybe kids like that are a really good reason to switch those computers. I could install Firefox and get flash, shockwave, and javascript installed, then put up signs telling people to use Firefox. If the little kids got used to Firefox at church, they might decide they wanted to use it at home as well. I could print off some instruction sheets for installing Firefox, and let the conversion begin.

Re:I've been testing it...

[jb.hl.com]

You mean like Adblock [mozdev.org]?

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[HomerJayS]

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.

Re:How about. . .

[jdavidb]

How can you NOT have flash installed. There are many legit sites that include flash.

There is one site I would desperately like to get more out of, but Flash hinders that. I expect them to wise up in time.

It provides much more functionality than straight HTML pages.

But nothing I want.

You can include Video and sound.

I don't want it. If I want video or sound, I want it as a downloadable media file.

You're not restricted to the page placement limitations of HTML pages.

I don't want that in HTML pages I read. You are talking about things that site authors want, not site readers.

You can create full functional applications with Flash where you cannot do the same with HTML.

But I don't want that.

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.

I'm not installing Flash because I don't want all the whizbang stuff it does.

Say hello to the 1990's for me.

So if you can't succeed in persuading us that we want the features Flash offers when we know we don't, you'll try to make us feel old-fashioned and foolish? You can't persuade us, so you'll try to shame us? I'm sorry, but that just sounds silly.

I won't cuss you out like one of your other respondants did, but I agree with his point that we don't want the stuff Flash offers.

The only value I have gotten from Flash is funny presentations like the recent JibJab movies. Some other people also like some of the Flash games. But again, I just want to download video files to watch. I don't want the entire web to consist of them.

Let me reiterate again: I do not want the functionality that you brag about Flash providing.

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[bonch]

It's my computer. It's my operating system. Web pages don't have the right to open whatever windows they want whenever they want on my computer.

I don't mind banner ads. I'm used to them. I will always hate pop-ups.

Re:Counter-counter-attack

[jlapier]

. 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?

Because they "won the browser war". When 80-90% of the world uses your browser for a couple of years, you don't feel inspired to improve on it much. Only relatively recently has IE had some competition, and thusly added a simple pop-up blocker.

Screw the pop-up blocker - what I'd rather have from IE is better CSS support (not as an end-user, as I use Firefox, but as a developer, because I'm sick of making a nice looking page only to see it mangled by IE...)

Re:ummm..

[SilicaiMan]

That was actually borrowed from Opera.
IMHO, Opera deserves much more respect than IE or even Firefox when it comes to browser innovation.

some issues

[unk1911]

i tried this new extension by going to http://www.popuptest.com/goodpopups.html [popuptest.com] 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 [blogspot.com]