Question about popup blockers

I don't use a popup blocker. Are they fully customisable, where I begin by allowing all popups, and then gradually add those I wish to be blocked, as and when I find them ? Thank you

I'm getting sick of those popups that try and get me to download a dialler, and when I decline, another popup appears to say I must click yes before I can proceed. These are the ones I'd like rid of.

Which blockers would people here recommend ?

 

There are some popup blockers [all free] at the link This one seems to work pretty well (EMS Free Surfer mk II) it is available at the link.

 

bigc73542 - Thank you Because I've never used one before though, can you tell me if they all (or some of them) can be customised as I described in my first post ? Again thanks

 

This one can be customized (EMS Free Surfer mk II) being free you can try it and see if you like it. you might want to try this one also. (Pop This!) also at the link. they are both fairly simple to configure and use.

 

Thank you again. You have been very helpful

 

There are in general 2 main type of popup blockers

1) Intelligent popup blockers, try to block only certain type of popups that are deemed unwanted. Generally popups that are not user initated are considered bad and are blocked.

The free ones are pretty good these days at this, a few of the payware might be a touch better against say modeless dialog boxes, but I don't think they are worth paying for. Sure there are lots of popup test sites that claim to show that X product is better than Y, but these usually rare techniques not normally seen in websites.

This assessement might change ,as anti-antipopup techniques evolve after the release of the built in popup blocker for XP SP2

Still even the best popup blockers occasionally foul up, either by blocking useful windows, or failing to block a unwanted popup.

The former problem is usually solved by a whitelist of sites or domains allowed
to open popups (or might monitor urls that are allowed to be opened), or by giving the user a hotkey to press that temporarily turns off the antipopup blocking function.

Failing to block a unwanted popup is a rarer and less serious problem, but some popup blockers allow you to create a blacklist that filters urls or windows titles. That is actually a form of trainable popup blocker.

2) Trainable popup blocker.

These are popup blockers that try to keep a list of sites/window titles or urls and close them/don't allow them to open. There are very few popup blockers that do this only, http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/pow.htm being one. Pretty worthless IMHO, since you got to manually imput every popup to block!

The best popup blockers are intelligence popup blockers with both black and preferably white lists that allow it to simulate a trainable popup blocker. Maxthlon and other similar IE shells for example have these.

Popup blockers also differ in the way they handle popups. You should also watch out for the worthless ones actually close the popup very quickly after they are opened, this creates a flicker, that can get very irriating. On the other hand, some sites actually monitor how quickly the popup is closed (or if they are opened at all) and react accordingly so popups killers like
Eg http://www.endpopups.com/ can fool websites into thinking a human is manually closing the popup and allow you to avoid antipopup procedures.

They also differ in the way they are intergreted with the browser. Many are implemented as a BHO (assessable via context menu, toolbar etc) eg Adshield,popthis!, some create system trays (EM Surfer), it's up to you which type you prefer. This in turn will affect how the popup blocker notifies you when a popup is blocked, and what you can do about it (eg open the blocked popup).

 

Hi PepsiMax.

bigc and JustHelping gave some very good links/advice.

I would like to offer another alternative.

First, I presume you are using IE, as most other browsers have popup stoppers built in.

The alternative you could also do is get an IE engine based browser, which uses IE's core engine, but gives many extra features, tabbed browsing, easy cache/cookie cleaning; easy ActiveX/Javascript blocking on the fly + POPUP blocking.

I was a dedicated MyIE Browser user until I got Firefox and MyIE has a great popup blocker [set it to hear a sound of popups being, no flicker, instant].

That is of course if you want to go that way, just thought I would point it out to you.

http://www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm

Cheers, TAS

 

PepsiMax;

I have been evaluating Service Pack 2, Release Candidate 2 for a while now. The new version of Internet Explorer that comes with it actually does a very good job stopping popups when the popup protection is set to high. I compared it to the latest version of Firefox, and it is actually better. What makes it better is that it actually tells you that it blocked a popup. It also lets you give that website permission to use popups.

I used the following site to evaluate the popup blocking of the new IE and Firefox:

http://www.proxomitron.info/tests/poptest.shtml

The current Internet Explorer shows three popups as soon as this page loads. Then it fails all of the other tests, showing a popup in each test.

Close Hauled

 

No question, XP SP 2 is good. It block mode and modeless dialog boxes, according to specs I have read, something that most freeware and payware popup blockers currently don't block.

Also their innovation of creating a thin toolbar that appears whenever a popup is blocked has being copied by both Maxthlon (formerly MyIE2) and Firefox (try the branch builds)!!

And of course Firefox 1.0 will allow you to directly open blocked popups as opposed to the current system of unblocking the page, reloading it again.

The coming of XP SP 2 has indeed raised the bar for popup blockers, even before it's officially released. The burning question is, how will advertisers react? Will they resort to CSS dynamic floating Ads and other similar simulated popups?

It's going to be a interesting ride for sure.









The interesting thing is that both Firefox 1.0 and even Maxt