Ed Bott's Windows Expertise

My logs show a lot of people visiting this site looking for advice on how to stop Firefox pop-ups and pop-unders, which seem to have increased in frequency lately. Here’s an interesting bit of inside information from Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Organization:

A number of pundits and bloggers have been wondering aloud whether or not we’ll be able to keep up with the pop-up spammers now that more of them are focused on us. Well, we shipped 1.0 with the capability to block these pop-ups and pop-unders but we didn’t enable it because we were concerned about breaking legitimate uses. If you’d like to turn it on, it’s a fairly simple change — and would be absolutely trivial for us to enable once we determine whether or not lots of websites are depending on the feature.

Here are the specific configuration steps to take to turn on the capability to block pop-ups from plug-ins, according to Asa:

1. Open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser.
2. Type about:config in the address field and press Enter.
3. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and click New, Integer.
4. Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the New Integer Value dialog box and click OK.
   
5. Type 2 in the Enter Integer Value dialog box and click OK.

That’s all you need to do. Note that there are three possible values allowed in this dialog box:

• 0: open allowed
• 1: the opened windows are treated as popups, but they’re allowed to open (Firefox limits the number of these types of popups)
• 2: the window is a popup, block it

If you try this and encounter problems, be sure to let Asa know.

7 Responses to “Block those Firefox popups!”