10.18.04
When Popup Blockers Are No Longer Enough
Some time ago (a matter of about six months) I noticed that one or two small-time websites were beginning to use a new popup technique which circumvented Firefox’s built-in popup blocker. The instances I saw usually used an absolutely positoned div made to look like a popup window via CSS.
This worried me. Once one of the major internet advertising firms began to use the new technique, there would be a new breed of pop-ups that would be much more difficult to block. Sure, the developers of the Mozilla project could anticipate the types of absolutely-positioned divs that will be used as popups, but if they chose to include this code as part of the popup-blocking routine, many valid (non-faux-popups) would also end up being blocked, as absolutely-positioned divs are becoming more prevalent for non-commercial website layout, as well.
Today, while visiting an article on the Time Magazine website, I found exactly what I had been fearing. A javascript file hosted on atwola.com (one of the major internet advertising firms, owned and operated by AOL Time Warner) was used to serve either a standard popup or the new CSS version based on browser type. It made it past Firefox’s popup blocker.
Luckily, for the last two weeks I’ve been using a fantastic new plugin for Firefox called Adblock which allows me to block any images, scripts, and iframes loaded into pages I visit. I took 15 seconds to add an entry for atwola.com, and I will no longer see popups, banners, or any advertisements, for that matter, served by atwola.com.
In addition to blocking any ads from a specific domain, or folder within a domain, Adblock accepts regular expressions as a more robust, concise way to preemptively block ads you haven’t yet encountered. If you’re just starting with Adblock, try importing the Adblock Rules I’m using currently.