Midknyte
04-06-2005, 01:43 PM
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007860.html
say goodbye (again) to pop-ups!
update: before you comment here, we already know what this breaks. This was a test and we'll be having another test soon that backs off a little bit. Thanks for your help testing. No need for further debate here about whether or not it's OK to break requested pop-ups. It's not. We need to do a better job at identifying requested popups. Our goal is to break as little as possible while preventing unrequested pop-ups. We're workin' on it.
A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.
Firefox has the capability to disable these pop-ups but it wasn't enabled by default in Firefox 1.0 because we had concerns about websites that rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.
Give that these pop-ups and pop-unders have really started to spread on the web, we're testing a quick patch that enables the Firefox pref to block them. I blogged about this earlier this month and included manual steps to disable these nasty pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to this fix, the good news is that for sites where you need these pop-ups, you can just whitelist them like you do other "wanted" pop-ups. This looks (at this stage) like a reasonable trade off.
If you're interested in helping us test this patch, we've packaged it up as a signed extension you can install (and disable or uninstall if you don't like it.) It's available for testing from our ftp site. You'll need to add the site to your whitelist for software installation and then agree to the extension install to get it - or, you can simply right click and save as then open locally in Firefox.
I'd appreciate any feedback on how this affects the sites you visit, how well it controls the pop-up and pop-under problem, and whether or not you find any sites that don't work correctly after installing the extension. Feedback is welcome both here and in email to asa@mozilla.org.
I'm also interested in specific cases of these plug-in triggered pop-ups and pop-unders that we don't block (without the patch) that IE does block on XP SP2. If you know of sites using plug-in triggered pop-ups that IE blocks, please let me know here or at the above email address. Thanks!
Download: Pop-ups Must Die! extension.
update: OK, thanks for the feedback. We're working on addressing the problems and hope to have another test soon. If this was too much for you, just disable or uninstall from your Extension Manager. Thanks for all your testing and feedback!
say goodbye (again) to pop-ups!
update: before you comment here, we already know what this breaks. This was a test and we'll be having another test soon that backs off a little bit. Thanks for your help testing. No need for further debate here about whether or not it's OK to break requested pop-ups. It's not. We need to do a better job at identifying requested popups. Our goal is to break as little as possible while preventing unrequested pop-ups. We're workin' on it.
A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.
Firefox has the capability to disable these pop-ups but it wasn't enabled by default in Firefox 1.0 because we had concerns about websites that rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.
Give that these pop-ups and pop-unders have really started to spread on the web, we're testing a quick patch that enables the Firefox pref to block them. I blogged about this earlier this month and included manual steps to disable these nasty pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to this fix, the good news is that for sites where you need these pop-ups, you can just whitelist them like you do other "wanted" pop-ups. This looks (at this stage) like a reasonable trade off.
If you're interested in helping us test this patch, we've packaged it up as a signed extension you can install (and disable or uninstall if you don't like it.) It's available for testing from our ftp site. You'll need to add the site to your whitelist for software installation and then agree to the extension install to get it - or, you can simply right click and save as then open locally in Firefox.
I'd appreciate any feedback on how this affects the sites you visit, how well it controls the pop-up and pop-under problem, and whether or not you find any sites that don't work correctly after installing the extension. Feedback is welcome both here and in email to asa@mozilla.org.
I'm also interested in specific cases of these plug-in triggered pop-ups and pop-unders that we don't block (without the patch) that IE does block on XP SP2. If you know of sites using plug-in triggered pop-ups that IE blocks, please let me know here or at the above email address. Thanks!
Download: Pop-ups Must Die! extension.
update: OK, thanks for the feedback. We're working on addressing the problems and hope to have another test soon. If this was too much for you, just disable or uninstall from your Extension Manager. Thanks for all your testing and feedback!