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.



  1. GaryM says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

    thanks Pete and John.

  4. Jonathan Bacon says:

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

  5. Robert Nichols says:

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

  6. Miguel Lopes says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

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

  12. Jon says:

    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 says:

    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 says:

    Simply OUTSTANDING!!!

  15. LemonJoose says:

    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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