Pop up massacre

I have had enough of the latest rash of pop ups and pop unders that seem to circumvent Firefox’s Block Pop-Ups option. An hour’s reading and research has led me to implement the hosts file solution detailed here, using Dan Pollock’s hosts file text posted here. As well as seemingly halting the annoyances, it was also a useful first introduction to working in Mac OSX’s Terminal app.

One Response to “Pop up massacre”

  1. I know it doesn’t matter much now, since you’ve solved your problem, but Firefox users might want to know about this trick, too, to stop pop-ups and especially pop-unders. I stole it from a forum I belong to:

    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.

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