Office applications Toolkit

Firefox improves pop-up ad blocking

Published: 04 Apr 2005 17:40 BST

The Mozilla Foundation has developed a beta patch for the Firefox browser that it claims improves the blocking of pop-up ads.

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 lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the Web," said Dotzler. "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 1.0 can block pop-ups launched by plug-ins, but this feature is disabled in the default set-up as it would affect Web sites that relied on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality, according to Dotzler. The beta patch resolves this issue by enabling users to whitelist sites where pop-ups are needed.

The beta patch has been packaged as a Firefox extension, called Pop-ups Must Die, and can be downloaded for testing here.

Did you find this article useful?
76 out of 182 people found this useful

More In Office applications

Related Jobs

Flash / Actionscript Web Developer 30-35k Gloucester

Huxley Associates are looking for an experienced Flash / Actionscript Web Developer to work for our exclusive client based in Gloucester. Required ...

Flash Developer- Digital Agency

You will have extensive experience building data-driven Flash applications in an object-orientated environment. You will be required to produce high ...

Flash Actionscript Developer

My client in Bath is looking for a highly experienced flash developer to carry out web development on an exciting new project. You will need to be ...

Featured Talkback

Why do so many (virtually all) software packages think that they are so important that they have to be started automatically every time the computer boots? What is the largest number of "speed access", "update check", "camera download" and whatever other background programs you have ever seen running? Of those, how many did you really need?