Pop-up/under Trickiness

Recently we were discussing that there are a series of new pop-ups/unders which are beating the software which is designed to block them. Safari, FireFox, and even updated versions of IE will block pop-ups, as well additional toolbars including the one from Google.

Not all of them work this way, but the good ones do. They employ an effective strategy which consists of looking at all events which ask for a new window to be generated, and they look to see if they either come from the browser (if you went into the File menu and created a new window), keyboard (Ctrl-N in Windows), or from an on-click event (you clicked on a link designed to pop-up).

What the new variations of these are doing is that when you click on any of the links on the page, they are also executing JavaScript code which opens a window (whether it is in front of behind depends on their preferences, but generally speaking the ones going behind are showing to be more favored since they are less immediately noticeable, and therefore it is harder to know which site spawned it off on you - therefore you can't rage at them and might even click on the ad).

There are a few ways around this, but it is yet another example of how the spammers and annoying advertisers are playing the never ending cat and mouse game with the people who want to block what they do.

Posted by Eric at March 8, 2005 01:10 AM | TrackBack