I keep up-to-date with Firefox and the few plug-ins I use. You can imagine my frustration when, recently, Firefox — which has been delightfully pop-up free in the latest versions — began to return pop-ups and pop-unders.
This morning I decided to Google around for a solution and found one, first page of results. Special Kudos to Pete Bevin, a 34 year old web geek in Toronto, Canada. His solution identified the culprits as using the Flash plug-in. A line or two of code and I’m back running pop-up FREE!
Thanks, Pete.
I love the comment on the guy’s site on October 19th:
“great work! You must be doing something right if Dvorak blogged you…that’s how I found it!”
Thanks for the tip Mr Dvorak!
You can also make use of Fasterfox, a plugin that not only speed-tweaks Firefox, but also comes with a built-in Flash ad blocker.
thanks Pete and John.
This is great. I have been having this problem for awhile now. Seems to work well. Thanks
I use the Flashblock extension and never noticed any problems with pop-ups.
Is there anything of the sort for IE? I’d like to use that on my company’s PCs, and they’re all IE…
Try Avant Browser. It’s an Internet Explorer overlay program, but it allows you to block pop-ups, pictures, & flash. I install it for anyone who doesn’t like IE (everyone) & have not had one disatisfied customer in all the years it’s been in development.
You know I found this same problem and solution a few monthes back on Digg.com while going through all the old posts, unfortunently I still seem to get some flash ads that get through, and worse, I can’t even manually block them with another plugin I got to block ads from certain sources.
I mostly have this problem with popups from newgrounds.com
Rather annoying. This one does work great on majority of pop ups in flash however.
Checking my config, I found that item already existing and set to 2. This is FF Deer Park Beta 2, perhaps that is in that version by default?
I was wondering how pop-ups were getting through– even when looking at cached pages from Google searches. Thanks for sharing this very useful tip, John. And bless Pete Bevin for finding and publishing a solution to this annoying problem.
Ahhh life just got a little bit better! Have to try that fasterfox too.
I just disable Flash all together; maybe it’s a good technology, but there are just too many morons who wrote crappy Flash code that does stupid things…
OK. What are the pop-ups on torrentsearch.com? I changed the setting, and even use flashblock extension for firefox. Seems to be a different type of pop-up.
Simply OUTSTANDING!!!
The fix you mentioned kills the Flash-based pop-ups, but I still get some pop-ups that come through. I think they use Java somehow to get around the Firefox pop-up blocker. Try going to bluesnews.com, and you should get a pop-up.
You can test your pop-up blocker at:
http://www.kephyr.com/popupkillertest/