Stopping the New Popup

For those of you who haven’t heard there’s a new way for advertisers to bypass the Mozilla/Firefox popup blocker, as discussed in bug 281472 and in Slashdot’s article: The Return of the Pop-Up Ad. Well, there is now a work around for this problem, as I wrote in bug 281472 comment 8.

  1. Go to about:config (type it in the address bar)
  2. Set browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true (type “single” in the Filter to find it quickly)
  3. Go to Tools > Options…
  4. Select the Advanced tab
  5. Check Force links that open new windows to open in:
  6. Check the same tab/window as the link

That will also stop all those annoying target attributes spawning unwanted new windows. However, some people may not want to block the target attribute completely, but everyone hates those pop-unders. To control whether or not a popup can actually pop under or not, that’s very simple too. (There’s no need to change the setting in about:config above before making this change)

  1. Go to Tools > Options…
  2. Select the Web Features tab
  3. Select the Advanced… button
  4. Uncheck Raise or lower windows
  5. I recommend you uncheck all of them, except for change images, but that’s your choice.