« My First Blogpost! | Main | Foxes (no fire). »
June 20, 2005
Killing more popups
Popups suck. We all know that. They make the user experience for the site that spews them at you far short of ideal. For a while there the web was a pretty calm place as far as popups go, but site developers (or abusers, really) got smarter and they figured out how to get past the popup blocker in Firefox 1.0 (and some other browsers too). The calmness is slowly but surely fading.
One of the easier and more common approaches for getting around the popup blockers is use a plugin to open the popup. Solving this problem in the browser across platforms is next to impossible. However, it's sort of solvable on Win32 and the Mac. The real fix needs to be a combined effort between the browsers and the plugins, the browsers need to disable popups from plugin content, unless the plugin says it's ok to open popups. To do this, the browser and the plugin needs to be able to communicate about this, and that's now possible in recent Deer Park nightlies. But for this new communication to happen the plugin needs to support it, and that means the user needs a new plugin and getting new versions of a plugin out to all Firefox users takes a long time. So we need an interim fix as well. The interim fix is to disable popups from plugins by default (which users have been able to do since Firefox 1.0) and to make an attempt permitting popups from plugins when the user interacts with the plugin content where possible (i.e. Win32 and Mac). This leaves Linux users sort of out in the dark, and that's unfortunate, but given the relatively small number of Linux users and the really small number of pages that open valid popups from plugins (I know of exactly 0 such pages) it seems like a reasonable overall approach until updated plugins are available.
That's now all done. If you want to help test this out, get a nightly Deer Park Alpha build and go to all pages you know of that open popups from plugin content, either wanted or unwanted ones (i.e. ones that show up just because you load the page, or ones that show up when you click a button in a flash animation or whatever).
Posted by jst at June 20, 2005 10:29 PM
Comments
dude can you add yourself to planet and feedhouse?
Posted by: poningru at June 21, 2005 12:30 AM
"I know of exactly 0 such pages"
The top bar (flash) button for signing in at:
newgrounds.com is one.
They claim to have over 770,000 registered users.
Posted by: Axord at June 21, 2005 12:32 AM
Have any of the plugin makers committed to using this new API yet, or is it too early to tell?
Posted by: FP at June 21, 2005 2:40 AM
Care to elaborate what exactly are the problems with the linux builds and why the browser cannot communicate with the plugin?
And something else: please make the email address in the comments non-mandatory.
Posted by: ixs at June 21, 2005 3:59 AM
But linux will get support when the plugins are updated?
Posted by: Fergy at June 21, 2005 4:47 AM
http://www.xbox360.com/ is an example of a page with valid popups from Flash.
Posted by: DopefishJustin at June 21, 2005 8:27 AM
Why not just remove the ability to create popups altogether? It should never have been introduced. A web page should have no knowledge or access to the browser. A web-page should exist and function only within itself.
Posted by: hemebond at June 22, 2005 2:30 PM
Jst I would like to suggest another alternative. Something like what opera does. "Block All Popups". There is an option in about:config 'dom.popup_allowed_events' emptying its string blocks all popups no matter what but the problem that I have been having is that you cannot open them using the popup-icon's context menu. If that could be enabled a user could all popups but have an option to see them if he wants.
Posted by: ali at June 22, 2005 11:30 PM
Here's an exmaple of page that opens valid popups from a plugin. It is a content management system in Flash:
http://www.marquardt-multimedia.de/cms/
You can log in with
username: tester
password: admin
but you don't even have to to see the valid use of a pupup from Flash: click the button [SEITE ANSEHEN] that is used to open a preview window in this CMS.
It would be a shame if this kind of application does no longer work out-of-the-box with Firefox.
Posted by: Steve at June 23, 2005 9:22 AM
>unfortunate, but ok because of the relatively small number of Linux users
Thanks :( It's not ok to ignore us, even if we were a minority. For we're certainly not, especially amongst Firefox users. Please don't forget Mozilla, we got you where you are now. Your prime product was Mozilla, which shipped with every Linux distro for a decade. Now you've trashed the suite (without even passing it to community), and focus on 'converting' Windows/IE users to Firefox. And with each release, they get more similar - disabling find as you type, removing stylesheet switcher, big toolbar buttons.
I understand your reasons for this issue, but there has been a growing disconcern for Linux in Mozilla since the 1.0 launch. Linux bugs low priority, no .rpms or anything.
Posted by: matt at June 24, 2005 10:33 AM
RE: "the really small number of pages that open valid popups from plugins (I know of exactly 0 such pages)" -- Actually, lots of Flash ads open new windows when you click on them, so stopping all Flash popups would stop all clickthrus on those ads. There are also Flash games that open popups to display instructions and high score lists. I think any blanket restriction on plugin popups could be very, very conspicious and annoying for the user (a description that equally applies to unwanted popups, however).
Posted by: zaxios at July 15, 2005 7:41 PM