This only seems to happen on my work PC, but at frequent intervals when I’m on Gmail, I get the message from my pop-up blocker saying that it has blocked a pop-up. If I click to allow the pop-up, it comes up as a window with a plain white background and black text that appears to be a long hexadecimal string. Here’s an example:
Since I started typing this post, six of these pop-ups have appeared, all with the same string – which makes me think it may be specific to my account or session. (For that reason I have made a few minor changes to the string quoted above).
My guess is that Gmail’s fancy JavaScript/AJAX stuff isn’t cooperating with your browser version for some reason. I’d maybe hit the basic HTML formatted Gmail while at work. Less cool, but I’ll betcha no more pop-ups.
The browser is IE but there’s no version number on the browser. I guess it’s a stripped-down version, as certain features are disabled. The OS is Windows XP Professional. The pop-up blocker also has no name, it appears to be built-in.
Sorry if that’s not much help, but our office IT systems are very much “look but don’t fiddle” so I can’t get into the menus to check version numbers etc.
The HTML is quite a bit slower, however. The Java stuff doesn’t load a whole page over the net, just the new information(compressed at that) , and formats it on the fly.
Another alternative is to use your preffered mail client and the gmail POP/SMTP interface. This seems to work fine with outlook and the Opra mail client (only ones I’ve had occasion to try)