A web site I use a lot and also a program I use at work have this sort of pop-up behavior: In the lower right corner of the screen, a little message box emerges horizontally from the corner, showing some message until I click something.
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[li]Is there a name for this?[/li][li]In Firefox, is there a way to stop it? I have pop-ups set to No but this thing still happens.[/li][/ul]
Does it look like an IM window? I’ve seen that on some (ahem) more questionable sites I’ve visited.
firefox will block many popups, though there are popup and popunder techniques it doesn’t catch.
If you want to see it in action, go to NYTimes.com and occasionally you will see it happening in the lower right corner.
I think they are normally called popovers.
Depending on how they are implemented, you could probably stop them (in Firefox) either with the Flashblock extension (blocks Flash, obviously) or the NoScript extension (also blocks JavaScript, and other stuff too). (If they are ads, Adblock would probably work too.)
Personally I think NoScript is overkill. It will lose you a lot of functionality in many pages that rely on JavaScript for all sorts of quite legitimate purposes like menus, but I do use Flashblock, which stops a lot of annoying animated ads, as well as many of these these popover things. If you actually want to see any particular Flash content (such as YouTube style videos) you can turn any Flash object back on with a single click.
NoScript and Flashblock have the added advantage of blocking a lot of vectors for malware.
I also recommend the Nuke Almost Anything extension, which allows you to remove any item on a page with a right-click. It does not normally work on flash objects, but once they have been prevented from running by Flashblock it will. This is useful for (amongst other things) removing Flash based popovers, which can still get in the way of a page’s content even when blocked from actually executing.
Almost all of them are done with Javascript. This is why I love K-Meleon as a browser. It uses Mozilla’s engine, like Firefox does but you can easily toggle javascript on and off, with just the click of the button. So you go to one tap, hit the “Stop Javascript,” and don’t have to deal with it, then just “start javascript,” button and it’s all back to normal.
Not in my experience. Many of the sites I use, such as Yahoo and New Scientist, are lousy with Flash popovers. I only rarely encounter JavaScript ones, that do not get blocked by Flashblock.
Whenever I’ve tried NoScript, I always ended up turning it off for that reason. I found YesScript, which is just a list of sites which are not allowed to run JavaScript. This is great, because the sites which abuse JavaScript get added to the list, and never bother me again. I only have five sites listed, but it’s a world of difference.
ETA: Yeah, NewScientist is on my list, and it blocks those popover things.
Firefox will pop up some messages by itself - for instance, when it’s done downloading and saving a large file.
I don’t think there’s a more specific term for that than “pop-up”, but usually the term “pop-up” refers to some site that just spawns new windows (or overlapping subwindows) without your consent. If you have the latter, you might consider installing the “AdBlock Plus” plugin.
Thanks everybody! I installed YesScript and so far it seems to be doing the trick very nicely!
This doesnt sound like a web app, but a native windows app. This is called a system tray notification. There are ways to shut them off, but I dont advise it as it sometimes contains important information from other programs like your AV.
Download.com has it when you do a search as well.