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Originally Posted by omega I did a search on popups that bypass Firefox and it turns out that the webmasters exploit the plugins of Firefox. The only way to stop it is to disable plugins like Java and Flash. But HOW? A lot of sites use Java and Flash. Disable these and legitimate sites would get screwed. Don't disable and popups. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!! WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD CLICK ON STUPID POPUPS as to encourage advertisers to keep inventing new ways to display ads! STOP CLICKING people and tell the webmasters this feature blows! Otherwise I will have to continue pulling my hair out in frustration. On the bright side, bald is in this season I hear.
First spam. Then phishing scams. Then pharming scams. Now this. I need some coffee. |
There's little you can do about this stuff, and it's really irritating. You can't really disable Java or Flash without breaking a lot of websites. But one way you can fight back under Firefox at least is to use the Adblock extension. This nifty little tool will let you blacklist sites or specific types of content from specific sites, etc. It can block images, scripts, Flash, and Java amongst other things. If you encounter a site that you use a lot which has irritating popups you can just blacklist all their Flash by creating a filter rule ending in '*.swf' which means that it will block all the Flash applications from the site you put before that. Using combinations of the wildcard character you can create very powerful rules which get rid of most of the crap (for example, the rule '*ads*.swf' will block all Flash from URLs with the word 'ads' in them.
It's not perfect, but these sorts of filters at least give you back some control over your browsing experience. They're great for permanently blacklisting the more irritating banner ad companies as well (I think sites have a right to be supported by advertising, but things like Flash ads with sound and those ultra-irritating "flashing" animated GIFS go way too far and intrude on my right to browse in peace. Any advertising company that uses those tactics gets their whole servers blacklisted from my browser).
I've never seen any popups like this post describes on Aquabid, however. My guess is this is spyware, though I could be wrong.