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best popup blocker

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 5:00 pm
by matthijs
Just a moment ago I lost my browser session due to some very irritating "system doctor" popup trying to tell me my system is infected and I need to install blabla bla. There's nothing else to do then force quit Firefox and restart the browser, as this popup totally takes over every control.

Normally Firefox is pretty good at blocking stuff like this, but every single time it doesn't it's one too many. Should I go back to javascript-less browsing?

And it's not that I browse dubious sites. These things happen on the average tech site. I read a bit about it and the "webmasters" of these sites can't do much about it since they sell the advertising space to some agency, which sells it as well, etc. So very hard to control what ads come on the site. I don't completely believe this, because if you run a site you are responsible for what's on it. Go find a better add agency then..

As I'm on a mac I'm pretty safe but I can't help but think about these poor people who've never heard of force-quit and just click on the popups trying to remove them and with that installing all this spyware stuff...

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:01 pm
by feyd
What's Javascript?

:)

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:06 pm
by veridicus
The way to permanently stop it is to never visit those sites. When everyone leaves from the annoying ads the annoying ads will no longer be used. The very first time I go to a site which annoys me, I never go back. That goes for any kind of site. They obviously don't care about my experience on their site if they let their advertisers do anything they please.

I used to work on a huge European site. Obviously they had big advertisers. They had choice over every detail of advertisements on their site.

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:29 am
by matthijs
feyd wrote:What's Javascript?

:)
Don't know, something bad and scary on the internet, according to my aunt (she knows a lot about computers) :)

Veridicus, you're absolutely right. Normally I would do that. It's just that sometimes you follow a link a la "hardwarereview dot com has a good review of phone X".

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:37 am
by aaronhall
Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722 -- will let you selectively disable javascript by domain.