Seconded. From what I’ve seen, all popups flash “about:blank” for a second before they connect. Sometimes they’ll hang and the popup window will stay as “about:blank”. There is nothing nefarious going on.
Not according to Symantec and they keep track of this sort of thing.
Well, Symantec (whose software would crash regularly on my computer) is ignorant, then. about:blank is (a) the command to MSIE, and presumably other browsers, to load a completely blank page, and (b) a CoolWebSearch variant that self-downloaded, stored itself as a randomly named DLL so extirpating it was a bitch, and assumed the identity of the blank “about:blank” page. IMO the Peter they’ve been consulting for their information is not Mr. Norton, but one they’re attached to. 
Plus, Symantec might simply have a different name for it, every company makes their own names for this stuff.
No, Symantec does associate CoolWebSearch and Adware.Fastsearchweb with about:blank but those are the only two. They have absolutely nothing about a trojan being associated with about:blank.
As this isn’t really Pitworthy, I’m moving this to MPSIMS.
Thanks, GSV Consolidation of Dreams. I was hoping that was it, but “they” can make it look so official.
No, it’s really not besides the point. Popups may be annoying, but they’re nowhere near the sort of annoying that a destructive hijacker like CoolWebSearch is. You are reacting to seeing “about:blank” (which is, in this context, totally innocent, harmless, and safe as milk) as though it is a route of spyware infection. It’s not. Having your homepage stuck as a crappy search page, while the address field reads “about:blank” is an indication that you’ve got a hijacker. There is no known spyware out there that will load blank pop-ups at a particular site. Whatcha got going on there is a pop-up blocker that doesn’t work very well.
Accusing a website of foisting malicious and destructive software is quite different from noting that they have pop-up advertising.
Myself, I don’t believe I have ever seen an ad of any sort on Snopes, annoying or not. If you’d rather not get worked up about it, use this simple hostsfile-based adblocker, and stop fretting. It’ll work like a charm, even if you use that shitty browser that seems to be the only one without consistently reliable pop-up blocking built right into it.
I apologize to IE users for that dig. I didn’t realize that Firefox’s pop-up blocking was unreliable.
I sure do loves me some Opera.
I remember well the first time I got a pop-up on Firefox. It was on Snopes.
Eventually, Firefox was giving me as many pop-ups as IE ever did. Ironically, Microsoft then added a pop-up blocker to IE which made that browser better than Firefox, at least as far as pop-ups were concerned. I’m now back to using IE, with the Google toolbar adding an extra layer of pop-up protection. (The Google toolbar is just awsesome in general. A search engine, pop-up blocker, and spelling checker, plus some other stuff that I don’t use.)