Kill Firefox Popups
If you use Mozilla Firefox, then you know that one of it’s cornerstone features is the built in popup blocker. Probably the most significant reactions that I’ve gotten from converted users is their great satisfaction in not having to deal with any popups at all. Almost. Like me, you may have noticed that occasionally a popup sneaks through the Firefox popup blocker. It doesn’t happen very often, and so far it’s not a significant issue. However, today I stumbled upon a fix for this problem:
It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from Flash, getting around the Firefox default settings. Fortunately, you can get around it:
1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.
The possible values are:
* 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
* 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
* 2: Block popups from plugins.
* 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.
A word to the cautious though! It should be noted that the folks at Mozilla are aware of the problem. The reason it is not enabled by default in Firefox is that disabling these popups in this way could break a few selected sites that use legitimate popups with flash. So if you can deal with the problem for now, future releases of Firefox should conceivably have this problem sealed up and the proper popup blocking settings enabled by default.
In any case, there have also been some other interesting Firefox news and ramblings recently. Most notably are the reports that Firefox lost marketshare to IE last month for the first time since it’s 1.0 release. For now I just have one comment on that. It seems to me that Firefox has made significant, and overwhelming gains in one major groups of users: individuals and private consumers. Businesses have been resistant to the change because many of their intranets rely on IE-only features and non-Internet standards compliant software. So at this point I think we’re seeing a saturation plateau with the consumer conversion to Firefox. I blogged about this a while back, but essentially the release of IE7 and Windows Vista could ironically be the catalyst for the next significant boost in Firefox marketshare.
