A VC writes:
One of the main attractions of Firefox is the lack of spyware and associated stuff like popups that you get when you switch.
Well at least for me, that’s over.I got about four or five Firefox popups last week. The one shown above was courtesy of Panasonic.
I’d be curious to find out if this is happening to others.
Yes, it’s happening here. The makers of some types of popups have figured out how to work around Firefox’s popup blocker. Not only that, but apparently the Movable Type (blog software) Quick Post shortcut actually turns off the Firefox popup blocker!
This, by the way, is yet another piece of evidence that Firefox (although it is a wonderful bit of software) is not a magic bullet of security. As it gets more popular, it will get attention from the people who make popups, spyware, and other annoyances. Anyone want to bet on how long it takes before the first piece of spyware gets installed through Firefox?
Update: I created a clean Firefox profile and the browser is correctly blocking popups again. This suggests that an extension (probably related to tabbed browsing) is to blame. Is the incredible popularity and utility of Firefox extensions a double-edged sword?
Ed Bott 
” Is the incredible popularity and utility of Firefox extensions a double-edged sword?”
Yes, it is. And it has caused lots of people lots of problems.
–Asa
The problems with things like popups getting re-enabled and so forth is the reason why I gave up using the all-encompassing Tabbrowser Extensions (TBE) and then chose indivudual extensions which just offered the features I want. Ultimately, this was satisfied using the Mini-T extension (which allows you to drag and drop tabs to re-order them) and enabling a hidden preference to show some advanced tabbed browsing controls in the Options dialog which can force new windows to open in new tabs instead.
TBE has, in the past, inadvertently enabled popups again, and this was one of the reasons why I stopped using it.
Yes, it appears that TBE was the culprit here. After I set up a clean profile without TBE, the problem with the checkbox getting cleared went away. I still am getting (rare) popups, though. Even on a clean profile, I saw a popup this morning. So the game is on.
Firefox’s popup blocker seems to miss pop-ups triggered by macromedia flash’s geturl() function. I’m using adblock to block flash banners and this seems to have taken care of the issue. Unfortunately, adblock seems to be blocking pop-ups that I want now. 😦
I just started getting popups on my LINUX machine using Firefox. I was using Adblock but it made the “send” and “reply” buttons on Yahoo! Mail null and void.
http://www.clicksor.com/paypopup/redirads.php [remainder of link, including URL that resolves to doubleclick.net, snipped – E.B.]
Those are the responsible parties for the popup that showed up on my computer today – the first popup firefox did not block – and yes I was using tabed browsing.
Recently, some trolls from Hell in the guise of programmers have started using JavaScript to bypass Firefox’s popup blocker. So heres how to stop most if not all of it until the next upgrade.
Go here and download/install the Adblock extension. Once you install it you need to close and then reopen your browser for it to work.
Go to The Adblock Project and look for Filterset.G (or just go here). Save the 2005-02-14a.txt file as txt.
Go to the Firefox Tools>Adblock> Preferences> Adblock Options> Import Filters. Select the text file and bring it into adblock.
I hereby credit Otto von Chriek @ http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=221923 for saving my popup free experience.
Take that Hell trolls!
[Edited to make links clickable – E.B.]
Wynter:
Is there any pre-existing file that would be overwritten if we go through that process? Should it be?
Thanks.
Heidi, I’m not Wynter, but I can tell you that this technique won’t overwrite anything. It simply adds a list of sites to the Adblock list. Should be safe and effective.
Thanks, Ed Bott!
Re: [FireFox] Popup Blocker Not Working
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,12727198~mode=full
There’s a follow-up here as well.
To block pop-ups from plugins, open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser, type about:config in the address field. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and select New -> Interger. Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the resulting dialog, hit OK, type 2 in the next dialog and youre all set.
I published the same tip two weeks ago, with more complete instructions and a screen shot.
Block those Firefox popups!
I think the recent FireFox update either fixed this issue, or an extension I installed added this value (perhaps FlashBlock)
Anyway, I am not getting any pop ups with that value added to the config.
Cheers…
Firefox 1.5 and newer automatically block pop-ups from plugins, which was probably the main cause of pop-ups. There are other solutions for pop-ups in this knowledge base article:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Pop-ups_not_blocked
” Is the incredible popularity and utility of Firefox extensions a double-edged sword?”
Having dipped your toe in the water of free and open software, you can always go the whole hog, and move to linux. It’s not a tivial transition, but it makes it pretty much impossible for others to mess with your system!