It’s time for me to pick up a popup killer for my home and office systems (both IE over Win98), so I checked the archives for opinions. Looking back 3 months, I only saw about three recommendations:
Note that others may have suggested these sites as well; I’m just crediting the first occurrence in each thread. Apologies if I missed any. Also, I didn’t include Max Torque’s recent review of Safari for Macs.
Here’s my question. Although a couple of posters mentioned that “[insert software] is the best I’ve seen,” there was really no other indication that anyone had actually ran through multiple packages to compare features and usability. I intend to do something like that, and have downloaded Free Surf and Proxomitron already, and will play with them over the next week or so.
Has anyone else tried multiple popup killers? Any other full-featured, easy to use favorites out there? Obviously, free is good, but if there’s a clearly superior package for a reasonable fee, I’d be interested in hearing about that as well.
I’ve only used and continue to use Proxomitron, for the price, free, it does a perfect job of stopping popups and is highly customizable. I like the customizable aspect, it may be too much for others and so the other packages mentioned may be better for you. The cool think about Proxomitron is that it grows with you, you can control what it filters out of the html stream before it hits your browser.
I have had a good experience with a little piece of software called, surprisingly, PopUp Killer. Formerly from XFX Software, it went open-source and is available on Sourceforge. It uses a customizable “black list” of popups, as well as offering a feature that will detect popups and close them before they open (also customizable.) It’s free, it works, and it’s even open-source.
I like Opera. It’s free, displays webpages faster than Internet Explorer, kills popups/javascript/flash (selectively), supports mouse gestures and encourages multiple webpages being open at the same time.
Once in a while a page with a java application will crash it. Supposedly version 7 is much better.
I have used The Proxomitron and Panicware (pop-up stopper). Proxomitron is neat, but a little over my head and no matter what I check in web filters, it isn’t killing sounds on web pages. That is one of the main reasons I wanted it, I hate music on web pages. There is a very big chance that I am using it wrong, but I have checked everything pertaining to killing sounds in the web filter, and the sounds still come up. Also, some pages don’t work well because of the filters, and you have to know when this is happening and bypass the filter.
Pop-up stopper works very well at killing pop-ups, but you have to remember (and know when to) hold down the CTRL key to see pop-ups you want. It kills them all, good ones and bad ones.
I use Free Surfer. It’s smart enough to know whether you’ve chosen to open a new window or not.
In others I’ve tried, if you wanted to click on a link that popped up a new window (like a link on the SDMB), you had to hold down the CTRL or Shift key. Free Surfer usually knows the difference between a popup you want and one you don’t (if it errs, it usually prevents the popup).
I use a combination of AdSubtract. and the option in my Mozilla browser that says, basically, “don’t open pop-ups that I didn’t request.” This combination works wonders for blocking nearly all ads, yet allowing pop-ups caused by links I actually click on. Some sites are very difficult to use if they are prevented from popping up other windows, but every ad I’ve ever seen hasn’t been the result of something I’ve clicked, but is just designed to pop up when a page loads. One of the nice things about this approach is that all the components necessary are free. AdSubtract Lite (the free version of AdSubtract) doesn’t block pop-ups by itself, but Mozilla handles that part. AdSubtract is just there to block banner ads and other nastiness.