#258487 blocking those flash pop-unders with firefox
There's been quite a lot of buzz around the blogs the last couple of weeks with people seeing the return of the pop-ups and pop-unders. It looks to me like the overwhelming majority of these are from plug-ins, mostly flash.
A number of pundits and bloggers have been wondering aloud whether or not we'll be able to keep up with the pop-up spammers now that more of them are focused on us. Well, we shipped 1.0 with the capability to block these pop-ups and pop-unders but we didn't enable it because we were concerned about breaking legitimate uses. If you'd like to turn it on, it's a fairly simple change -- and would be absolutely trivial for us to enable once we determine whether or not lots of websites are depending on the feature.
To block pop-ups from plugins
1. Open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser
2. Type about:config in the address field.
3. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and select New -> Interger.
4. Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the resulting dialog, hit OK.
5. Type 2 in the next dialog and you're all set.
This pref can actually take three values:
* 0: open allowed
* 1: the opened windows are treated as popups, but they're allowed to open (we limit the number of these types of popups)
* 2: the window is a popup, block it
If you turn this on, please let me know how it works for you so we can make the decision about offering it to users who aren't likely to be hacking in about:config.
DL it here: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.1&os=win&lang=en-US
