Thursday, April 07, 2005

Firefox Extends Its Pop-up Blocking

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.

According to Mozilla, many web sites are using these plugins to create a new breed of pop-ups that bypass the pop-up blockers now in use in some browsers like Opera, Firefox, and Maxthon...and in add-on tools like the Google Tool Bar.

While Firefox 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 rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.

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 PopupsDie, and can be downloaded for testing here.

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