Blog Home For Steve Suehring

Mozilla Firefox has kept its users happy with advanced features such as pop-up blocking and tabs and other things that users of IE are just now thinking about getting in the next version of Internet Explorer. Even with the pop-up blocking capabilities of Firefox, some pop-ups do get through. These pop-ups are spawned from within ads or other areas of the site that use plugins such as Flash. One site that does indeed use this tactic is the Drudge Report. It's possible to configure Firefox to stop these spurious popups too.

Here's how to do in Windows which is what I happen to be using this afternoon:

• Open Firefox and select about:config as the location.
• Right click anywhere within the config window and select New->Integer
• Within the preferences window, type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins, see Figure 1.

   

  

   

• Next, you'll enter the value for this preference. In this instance, enter a 2 to block all pop-ups. A value of 0 enables these types of pop-ups which you may need to do for certain sites (designed by people who need to take a web usability class, no doubt). A value of 1 enables some types of pop-ups. Figure 2 shows the value entry dialog.

   

  

   

• Enjoy.