How to Stop Firefox Popups
Firefox has long been my web browser of choice. Features such as tabbed browsing, multiple extensions, and intelligent popup blocking make it the most usable browser available.
Lately, however, it seems that more and more popups are managing to get through. I did some checking, and it seems that the Macromedia Flash plugin allows webmasters to launch popups in a way that bypasses Firefox’s built-in blocking mechanism.
Fortunately, there’s a way you can get around it. Here’s what you have to do:
1. Type “about:config” into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select “New–> Integer”
3. Name the new value “privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins”
4. Set the value to 2.
In case you’re interested, the other 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.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I plugged this in and it did not seem to have any effect, even after stopping and starting Mozilla services.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
hey jordo – it does stop popups launched from flash, maybe the popups you’re getting are from one of the other methods? (there is a particularly annoying javascript method in heavy use now that launches a popup if you click anywhere on the screen, eg a text box, or even if you right click to use a mouse gesture. when i get time i’m going to look into stopping those)
-e
July 17th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
There is a sort of pop-up I’ve been seeing of late that is transparent window overlayed upon a webpage… like a html Layer, but in a “window” of it’s own… is there some way to kill these?
–Mike
October 5th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Hi Eddie…I’ve used Firefox for a long time and have never been bothered by popups. I use the Adblock extension (there are two versions available, both seem to work well). Perhaps these extensions could help Jodo and Mike….Jim
January 26th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Just typing “about:config” in the window that was cycling a message pop up and not allowing me leave, stopped the script. Whatever it was caused by, a java message popup window, malicious script, whatever, it allowed me to continue working. Thanks!