Have Pop-ups Returned to your copy of Firefox?

Published on October 19th, 2005

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.

15 users responded in " Have Pop-ups Returned to your copy of Firefox? "

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# 1 GaryM said, on October 19th, 2005 at 9:37 am

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!

# 2 Mikey said, on October 19th, 2005 at 10:11 am

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.

# 3 agile said, on October 19th, 2005 at 10:48 am

thanks Pete and John.

# 4 Jonathan Bacon said, on October 19th, 2005 at 11:08 am

This is great. I have been having this problem for awhile now. Seems to work well. Thanks

# 5 Robert Nichols said, on October 19th, 2005 at 12:47 pm

I use the Flashblock extension and never noticed any problems with pop-ups.

# 6 Miguel Lopes said, on October 19th, 2005 at 1:11 pm

Is there anything of the sort for IE? I’d like to use that on my company’s PCs, and they’re all IE…

# 7 Obviousman said, on October 19th, 2005 at 1:40 pm

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.

# 8 John L said, on October 19th, 2005 at 3:19 pm

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.

# 9 Hawkeye said, on October 19th, 2005 at 3:24 pm

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?

# 10 Wayne said, on October 19th, 2005 at 4:09 pm

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.

# 11 Milo said, on October 19th, 2005 at 7:34 pm

Ahhh life just got a little bit better! Have to try that fasterfox too.

# 12 Jon said, on October 20th, 2005 at 5:04 am

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…

# 13 Robert Nichols said, on October 20th, 2005 at 6:32 am

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.

# 14 Rob Walley said, on October 20th, 2005 at 1:17 pm

Simply OUTSTANDING!!!

# 15 LemonJoose said, on October 25th, 2005 at 7:48 am

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/

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