...Site popups, that is. As we move around the US, we are often having to rely on a slow dial-up connection to get email, browse the web, etc. I have found that there are several sites I have been looking for information on that spawn loads of sodding popups, most of which seem to be trying to sell me deviant sex. Normally, at home with a broadband connection, such a thing isn't as much of a nuisance, since they come up immediately, and can be instantly killed. Irritating, but no more so than most of the normal web experience nowadays.

However, when you're working on a modem link, the damn things load very slowly, often as background pages, and the first you know about it is when your link speed drops to a crawl. Close the main browser windows, and oh look, fifty million other windows sitting there with half loaded half naked (or often completely naked) women, men, sheep, god knows what else. What's the best way of preventing this behaviour? Is there one?

pca

Get mozilla, block popups, and start blocking images from ad sites (right click, block images from this site)

Google toolbar for IE has a pop-up blocker that works well.

The Google Toolbar now blocks popups for IE.

update your hosts file with a program like spybot snd. or find a hosts file somewhere. that will help alot. it wont block all, but you can add to it when you find new ones that arent blocked. my hosts file is currently 309,866 bytes.

edit : this wont stop them from popping up. but it will save your connection as they load nothing.

MSN9 will block popups as well...

OK, I wouldn't normally be using MSN but with a 5yearold in the house with his owsn pc surfing the web by typing in any word he sees whether he knows what it spells or not is making me a bit nervous so I'm exploring different things. Maybe the internet safety features will actually work.... I'm not holding my breath though.

later.

I'll third or fourth the vote for the google toolbar pop up blocker. great stuff.

My favorite software for blocking popups and ads is AdShield. It's the only IE popup blocker I've seen that works without crashing or intruding on resources. It's very lightweight, yet very powerful.

It also has a pretty novel way of working... it blocks based on a substring of a URL. So for instance, you can add the substring "/ads/" or "ads." or ".adserver." or "/banners/" or whatever you like to its blocklist, and it will block the entire URL that contains that substring. The ad is never even downloaded to your cache, the request never goes out of IE.

It also has a whitelist, so that if you want to block popups for everything except sites containing "www.riocar.org", you can do that, too.

I've been using Mozilla Firebird for a couple of months now and find it crashes about 20 times less than IE - not that I've been counting but I have only cursed at it a few times now.

The only think that did piss me off was upgrading to 0.7 - it didn't load with my old profile and I had to recreate it. Bookmarks and cookies moved over fine but the password manager file didn't and I couldn't find a way to make it work.

I have a nice "userChrome" file which blocks banner ads etc. quite nicely, except it also blocked Google AdWords which I quite like (and indeed have spent £70k with so far this year), so I removed it.

Gareth

Ok, I've downloaded the google thing and will give it a go. I haven't used a modem for connection to the net in several years, and I hadn't really realised how bad the situation had become. Finding that your 46K link is actually transferring useful data at a whole 287 bytes per seconds is a bit of a shock. Then finding out that this is because some site you clicked on in a google search 20 minutes ago has spawned some script which has been happily downloading background popups featuring remarkably hard-core porn (straight, not-so-straight, and positively corkscrew-shaped), ads, text files, at least two trojans (luckily pccillin caught them), and some of the weirdest [censored] I've ever seen is just annoying. I think the site in question was a paintball one, but I'm not sure.

How much of the available internet bandwidth is taken up by this crap, do you suppose? And do the ads ever work? I mean, I'm not against porn per se, but if one wanted some surely one would look for it, not just follow links at random on the off chance that the donkey-shagger ad led to something useful?

Just seems like a waste of time and resources to me.

pca

Agreed, the situation is pretty bad.

It's all Javascript's fault.

My favorite software for blocking popups and ads is AdShield.

yeah, the only thing is that adshield became non-free since it was so good. i've moved on to google toolbar. besides, i usually dont use IE unless i need to. opera is my choice, and has great popup blocking.

now i just wish there was a way to block ANNOYING flash adverts.

make sure you also don't have any spyware running in the background. ad aware and spybot are good scanners.

yeah, the only thing is that adshield became non-free since it was so good.

The last free version before it became a commercial product is still very very good. I wonder if there's any official place to grab it on the net, or if searching is all you can do...

I use both Mozilla and the google bar with IE, and both solutions work very well. One thing I like about the google bar is that it tells you when it's blocking a pop-up and also that your can on a per-site-visit basis re-enable them which is useful for the occasional site that uses popups legitimately.

It's all Javascript's fault.

No, don't blame a tool. It's the arseholes that write the scripts. Period.
Without javascript they'd just revert to doing strange things with META REFRESH tags.

One thing I like about the google bar is that it tells you when it's blocking a pop-up and also that your can on a per-site-visit basis re-enable them which is useful for the occasional site that uses popups legitimately.

Definitly handy, and this is one reason I switched from Mozilla to Firebird a while back.

I'm going to have to look into the Google AdWord killer for Firebird. It's amazing what people are doing with the extensions.

Here's the site with the userChrome for ad blocking:

http://texturizer.net/firebird/tips.html

Lots more things to play with there - I originally found the site while looking for a way to disable the way Mozilla automatically resizes images.

One cool setting is:

user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

This is the time that Mozilla waits after receiving data before trying to render a page. This is normally 250s, but setting this to 0 seems to speed things up a bit.

Gareth

I use WebWasher - it seems to have all the features of Ad Shield, can be a proxy as well as using proxies, blocks popups, banners, and other malicious code, can anonymise your surfing in a number of ways and is free for non-corporate use. I don't know if any other banner remove programs do this, but it actually puts a transparent GIF of the same size as the original ad in place of, thereby not mucking up your site layout. And, it's available for Windows, Linux and Mac! I've been using it since about 1996 with no problems.

HTH,

Paul

WebWasher was one of many ad-blocker software programs I tried prior to settling on AdShield. It gave me a number of problems, such as causing IE to crash, and causing certain slowdowns and lockups on my system that I couldn't fix other than to remove it.

I'm sure it's working great for the majority of users, there must have been some quirk of my system that gave it fits.

ZoneAlarm Pro also does ad blocking. It's not as good as dedicated packages as you can't configure it very much apart from turning it on and off for specific sites.
As to who clicks on these things, I do know somebody who does. His PC is always full of viruses, trojans, premium rate dialers and god knows what else.

Hi!

IMHO IE just plain sucks! It is an bloated browser without features(tabbed browsing, stopping pop-ups etc.), allows broken javascripts to run, and the list goes on...

Try out Mozilla Firebird and download two extensions "Flash-Click-To-Play" and "Adblock".
Adblock removes ads based on urls, ex. */*ads*/*, *doubleclick* etc. It can hide or remove(dont load) the ads...
Flash-Click-To-Play hides flash-anims and only plays when you click...
It has _many_ more features and is really fast- just try it out!

/Fredrik

I haven't used a modem for connection to the net in several years, and I hadn't really realised how bad the situation had become

Think of us poor sods out in rural North Yorkshire, who haven't had the choice!

But I'll seventh or eighth the google, one of the better tips from this BBS, I can't remember whose it was, not that the quality isn't uniformly high.

I'll up the count for the google toolbar as well. love it.

Here's another vote for Mozilla Firebird

one more vote for google !!

Think of us poor sods out in rural North Yorkshire, who haven't had the choice!

How rural? I'm getting ADSL on Tuesday - can't wait!! I didn't think we'd ever get it here, but although the village is small it's on a BT trunk so the trigger level was only 150.

The exchange was actually converted yesterday and the local MP is "cutting the ribbon" on Friday. We were *supposed* to be able to look around the exchange but BT has now said we can't :-( They *did* however promise to put £200 behind the bar at The White Horse :-)

Gareth

I'll up the count for the google toolbar as well. love it.


Ummmm... yeah. What he said.

tanstaafl.