IE popup blocker suggestions

Lately, my wife's internet surfing has started to generate more popups than ever. I was just going to tell her to make sure to close them as they come up (she normally doesn't even notice them because she runs IE maximized), but as I was doing so, I came across a number of those that won't allow you to close them (what was Microsoft thinking?). I was then going to try to switch her over to Mozilla, but getting her to learn a new program is like pulling teeth.

So, what can folks suggest to block popups for IE? I've tried Proxomitron, but it's default rules didn't seem to work too well, and I don't feel like spending hours or days fixing them. I just want something that works pretty much like Mozilla's [don't] Open Unrequested Windows.

Edit: Oh, and I don't want to pay any money for it. Maybe if it's exceptional in some way.

Edit again: I found one called ``Free Surfer'' that seems to work pretty well. Anyone have any thoughts on it? (Plus I fixed a misspelling in the Subject.)

What OS? If XP then there's a pop-up blocker in TweakXP that so far (a couple of days) seems to do a pretty good job...

/Michael

Sorry. Win2K.

I know it's probably a stretch, but I run a little software firewall called ZoneAlarm Pro (maybe you've heard of it). Anyway, the new version (3.0.1-something) has popup- and ad-blocker functions built in. If a popup manages to get through, which is rare - it disappears within seconds. Very happy with it.

I've had decent luck with "pop up stopper". Iit's free, but they have better version for a fee. As far as closing the windows, "alt f4" dosen't work?

In reply to:

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I came across a number of those that won't allow you to close them (what was Microsoft thinking?).

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Is this what you're talking about? (<--attached)

If so, I think it may be more of a bug in IE that can be taken advantage of and not an intentional feature.

EDIT: I just tried running the attached HTML in Mozilla and it crashed the browser, so don't click on the attachment unless you're using Internet Explorer.

I have been trying several different popup-blocker packages, and each one so far has forced me to stop using it after a while because it had problems or limitations.

The one I am currently using and has worked fine so far (and hasn't forced me to stop using it yet) is called AdShield.

It is an IE plugin that is freeware. It is not a proxy (some of the other packages are proxies, which is a bit of a problem in certain configurations). Its advantage is that it doesn't globally blanket-kill all possible ads and popups, it only kills those that are kept in its internal list. This sounds like it would be a pain, but actually it's very convenient, because it doesn't automatically block certain popups that you would actually WANT to have. And it's really easy to maintain its internal list when you want to add one of your own.

Also, the developer is very "reachable" and I have exchanged emails directly with him. He's already working on fixing one minor cosmetic bug that I found.

There is a catch, though: It ships with an "empty" blocker list, which you must populate yourself. This is so that ad companies don't get mad at him and sue him for including their name in his list by default. If you decide to use this product, you can find pre-populated blocker lists elsewhere on the net, or I can send you mine.

The address for AdShield is http://www.adshield.org .

One final note: I installed AdShield on my wife's laptop. This is another indication that this is a good program, as I was never comfortable enough with the others to go that far with it. However, certain popups were still appearing on her PC, ones that weren't popping up on mine for the same sites. It turns out she had some other resident AdWare running (like Gator or CyDoor or something like that). So in addition to running AdShield on your wife's PC, make sure to use Ad-Aware ( http://www.lavasoftusa.com ) to scrub her PC clean of adware and spyware.

I'm going to try it. Sounds like this one is going in the right direction.

One of the things I like about AdShield is its ability to substring-block. For example, your blocker list can contain the strings /banners/ or /popup/, and any URL that contains either substring will go into the bit-bucket.

Of course, this creates the potential for having a blocker file that blocks "too much", but after a little tweaking, my blocker file is pretty much doing what I want it to do.

Hey Tony, could you either tell me where i could get a pretty good list of known pop ups, or maybe give me your list? I installed AdShield and wanted to get a list going. Thanks.

This program reminds me of PopUp Killer, what a great program that, so convenient.

The top sticky-post at the AdShield forum is on this subject. Click on this:

http://www.morelerbe.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=52

Yes, that is the type of window I'm talking about. However, in addition to your close window button, I can close it by bringing up the task manager, selecting that window and telling it to ``End Task''. The one on my wife's browser actually closed all of the IE windows when I did that, unlike yours.

BTW, Free Surfer successfully blocked that popup, but still allows the new windows from the url links on this forum. So far, I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm not so much interested in blocking ads as I am in blocking popups. I know that 99.9% of all popups are going to be coming from those ads, so that would be a good solution, but Free Surfer seems to be working out for me so far. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hi Bitt

I use a program called POW which is freeware.
It can be found here: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/pow.htm
There is also a lot of other interesting programs on that site..

Regards
Nicolai

I'm not so much interested in blocking ads as I am in blocking popups. I know that 99.9% of all popups are going to be coming from those ads

The problem is that a 100-percent solution to blocking all popups will also kill some popup windows that you don't want to have killed. There are certain sites that use popup windows legally and they are necessary for proper operation of the site. Which is why I like the way AdShield handles it. It kills most of the popups and lets me hand-edit its kill list, but the "good" popups don't get blocked.

I was using a 100-percent popup blocker that let you hold down CTRL to temporarily allow popups. It had nice features, but it was unstable and kept locking up my browser. So far, AdShield has been a lot more stable for me.

Heh, for me it seemed that if I could just get rid of X10 and "World's largest casino" ads, I'd take care of 90% of my popups Oh, and is it just me, or has X10 stopped showing up as much now?

By the way, I find that it's just as easy for me to simply use CTRL+W to close popups, but I'm probably going to try that adshield anyway.

The nice thing about Mozilla's popup killer is that it's titled "Open unrequested windows" with a checkmark meaning that it's allowed. 95% of the legitimate sites open up popups correctly allowing them to still work while the ads/survey windows are always unrequested.

Anyone know of an IE blocker that can do this?

And also, a temporary way in Mozilla to reenable the above setting without resetting the preference? That 5ish% of the sites out there are annoyning with legitimate unregistered popups.

The best that I've used is PopUpCop. With no configuration needed it's very effective at blocking the advertisement pop ups while allowing most legitimate pop ups that are needed for site navigation. For the occasional site that doesn't work properly, it's easy to disable it altogether or add the domain to an "allow list". My experience is that it just works 99% of the time without having to fuss with it. You can also choose to disable all sorts of other web annoyances like background sounds and window resizing.

It's an IE plugin and not a proxy or seperate app that has to watch for window titles. The only downside is that it costs $20 but is well worth it, IMO.

-Dylan

It would seem that there are approximately as many solutions to this problem as there are users that want this problem solved. An interesting state of affairs. In some ways, I'm sorry I asked and then answered my own question, but maybe this will help someone else (or provide me more fodder when Free Surfer fails miserably for some reason).

Free Surfer does seem to be doing a good job so far, but, honestly, I use IE about 10% of the time, so I'm not the greatest source for a review on this. It seems to work very similarly to Mozilla's [Don't] Open Unrequested Windows option, as the links on this forum, for example, still open in new windows, while ad-type popups have been reduced to zero, so far, in my small sampling.

I can't think of a site that has legitimate unrequested popups. Give me an example and I'll see what Free Surfer does with it.

I'll have to remember once next time I come across it, but most of the time it happens when clicking a link makes the browser change URLs and that new page tries to pop the window up. UInfortunatly it's bad webmaster design, and is identical to popup ads most of the time.

I have to admit that popup ads never crossed my mind back in 98 when playing with DHTML code in it's own popup window.

I've been using WebWasher for years. It's a proxy server that has all kinds of HTML editing features, URL blacklists, cookie filters, image filters, and more. I've got it configured with a long list of sites along the lines of "ads.nytimes.com", and my web surfing experience is sublimely quiet and faster than normal. On the odd web page that's screwed up by WebWasher, you can click on the icon in the tray and it disables itself. This is mainly an issue for sites whose home page wants to run some fancy JavaScript then pop up the main window for you.

Give me an example and I'll see what Free Surfer does with it

CNN when you first go to their site will give you a popup to "select your edition" and save a cookie which tells them you want the U.S. version or the EU version or whatever. Try that (delete your CNN.com cookies if you want to give it a shot.)

Also, my local sports channel has a website (http://www.comcastsportsnet.com/) that does a similar thing. Try those two out.

Actually, that CNN popup is one of the ones I prefer to have disabled permanently.

Or you could just accept the damn cookie.. But you mentioned before that you clear your cookies out a lot, so I guess the popup would be a bit of a pain.

Why can't these people figure out that popups have NO REDEEMING VALUE WHATSOEVER?

Oddly, for some reason, my IE doesn't want to accept cookies. This problem has survived a complete Win2K reinstall. And both of those sites won't do the popup thingy without cookies being active.

Maybe someone can give me a pointer on the cookie thing, too. (It's not just settings in Internet Options. Though if I do try to allow all cookies always from everywhere, it just gets reset the next time I look.)

Edit: It actually just occurred to me that my cookie problem might actually have something to do with installing Microsoft's completely half-assed IPv6 implementation. But I really don't feel like uninstalling it just to test that assumption. It seldom makes any difference anyway, as it actually does accept cookies; it just seems to break some cookie testing methods.

I think IE knows you're a Linux guy, and doesn't want to be nice to you.

Well, now it knows....

Edit: And, to clarify the record, I prefer to think of myself as a Unix guy. Of the five computers I've got up and running here, only one of them is running Linux, and it's a Beige PowerMac G3. I've also got a Sparc machine running Solaris and an Intel machine running OpenBSD. I am trying to get a job so that I can purchase a new computer for the wife so that I can get back to running a somewhat real OS on my main machine again, though. If anyone wants to donate an SGI or HP or IBM or DEC machine, I am trying to round out my processor collection. And get the temperature in this room up another ten degrees.

It definitely breaks both CNN and ComCastSportsNet. But it's easy to pause temporarily. Are you guys using something that wouldn't break this?

That's one of the reasons I like AdShield. It doesn't break CNN until I tell it to break CNN by adding the correct string to its database. If I've used a pre-created database that includes the CNN popup, I can easily remove it.

I had used PopUp Killer before, and it had some nice features including a thing that, when a popup first came up, allowed you to select whether it's a "good" or "bad" popup. So the CNN/Comcast ones could be easily added to the "these are okay" list (or, if you're Fabris, the "go the hell away" list.) But PopUp Killer also worked by reading titles/URL's of the popups, and that's far from ideal, and often it would bring my system to a crawl as it was trying to close the popups. So I got rid of it.

The "brings my system to a crawl" problem was one I experienced with several other ad-blocker and popup-killer programs. It is the reason I stopped using most of them.

So far, AdShield hasn't presented me with any performance problems yet, one reason I've stuck with it for so long.

Hey Tony;

Could you send me your blocked list. Your shameless endorsement of AdShield has made me download it and I don't want to re-invent the wheel (or maybe I'm just too lazy. )

My one gripe with AdShield, and the reason I disabled it, is that if you have a certain site, URL, etc. that is in your "bad list" and there are "good" links and/or popups coming from those sites, I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked. Like, let's say I am taking one of the canned lists that people have, but one of those filters is filtering out something I don't want filtered. How can I tell which is the offending entry?

PopUp Killer had a nice "log" feature that showed you which filters have been triggered, which made it easy to go get rid of a bad one. I couldn't figure out how to fix this on AdShield.

I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked.

Good point, I noticed this as a shortcoming as well. However, I haven't yet had trouble identifying problems. All I do is look at the page source of the "good" page, locate the URL string of what they were trying to load, infer from it what the blocker list is likely to have contained, and BOOM there it is, easily found in the blocker list.

I think I'll email the creator of AdShield and see if he's got an idea on how to improve it in this area.

Could you send me your blocked list.

I just use the one linked from here:

http://www.morelerbe.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=52

And then modify it to my particular needs.

I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked.

Okay, I emailed him. We'll see what he says about it. My suggestion was...

- First things first: Make the block-list searchable by substring. This will simplify digging up entries when you have to resort to manual labor in this case. Right now, I have to scroll through the whole block list to locate an entry. Because the list sometimes starts with a . or a /, I can't just go alphabetically.

- Second thing: Maintain an internal, volatile, in-memory-only list of all the recent URLs and popups that were blocked. Doesn't even have to be a big list, it can be just a dozen entries long. When I surf to a "good" page that doesn't work because of AdShield, I can call up this list of things that recently got blocked. From there, each item in the list should have a button or link so I can directly reach the block-list-item that was responsible for the block and edit/delete it accordingly.

well, ive browsed the boards for about a week now and this will be my 1st post. soon i shall have a 60GB rio!

anyways, i've tried all the ones mentioned in this thread except for popupcop but it sounds cool.

i've been using what i think is the best: ZeroPopup. it runs whenever IE is launched and kills ALL popups. close IE and it closes too. if you see that you're on a site that clearly uses popups to navigate, just press F10 and it gets disabled. then use the same key to re-enable it. it also displays a tray icon to select options and such. it now has a better 2.0 version but its not supposed to be free

ZeroPopup was one of the packages I tried for a while. It gave me problems, so I had to stop using it. If I recall correctly, it was performance and lockup problems. I open and close a LOT of web browser windows, and ZeroPopup would only tolerate me doing that a certain number of times before it killed itself and my browser along with it.