I care! I care!
I run adblock plus in chrome, I dont see hardly any ads. No ads at all on SDMB for example.
Or he recently installed something which, as part of its packaging, installed one of those oh so helpful programs that provide ads for your convenience. It’s for your convenience, seriously, like changing your starting page to ask.com!
If that’s the case, the offending program is either an extension which can be removed from the browser, or a standalone that can be removed via the usual “remove programs” procedure.
(Why do I know this? Because it happened to me last weekend; suddenly everything was full of ads, and the same style in all sites, from my local newspaper to Girl Genius)
I also think the OP is talking about javascript based overlays or modals that open within the same browser window but obscure the underlying page. Blocking these programmatically is harder than you might think. A lot of sites these days use javascript to position floating elements as a normal part of displaying a “fancy web 2.0” page. So it’s hard for a plugin to automatically distinguish between what’s the actual article and what’s an ad (since the article itself may be a floating <div> positioned by javascript over a fancy background).
Personally, I use the Firefox plugin NoScript to block most of these, but it’s a little harder to use and configure than most other plugins. The first time you visit any well-behaved page, you may have to click a button to “whitelist” it before content displays correctly or buttons work. Since it whitelists based on domain, popups may still be blocked if they come from third-party javascript.
As an added bonus a lot of malware uses javascript to exploit bugs and install itself, and it can block these as well.
I hadn’t heard they addressed it. Unfortunately my iOS is up to date but it still happens occasionally. Apparently I’m not the only one.
I regularly use Adblock, Ghostery, and ScriptSafe. I then ‘whitelist’ individual sites if needed to allow scripts or popups. I’ve had too many stealth installs of hijacky junk, from perfectly legitimate off-the-shelf places, or even email from mom, that I try to lock down my browser/computer to only what I wish to see or install.
ABP + custom HOSTS file = what the hell is a popup ad?
And then the page doesn’t load. Or worse, it loads, then unloads and tells you that it needs javascript. Faaagh.
I mostly use noscript or addblock, I have pup-ups disabled in the browser, and mostly I just avoid sites that put a big login-page across the top of the content to force you to become a “member” before reading anything.
Why would you guys think the guy who answers every complex computer question he sees in GQ would not know if he had malware? I practically remove malware from people’s computers for a living. (I say practically because most of the time I don’t get paid.) And I’m the guy who gets mad at people for trying to guilt you into turning off adblock–which I’ve commented on more than a few times.
A few of you figured out what I’m talking about. Yes, I’m talking about the Javascript layers that float over the main content. Anything that has an X you have to click before you can use the site is a popup. They are usually first party ads asking you to like or favorite or such like that. Why should the fact that it opens a new window make it any different? It’s still content that pops up over the original content.
What I’m asking is, why, if we hated popups so much before, did we let sites get away with doing it without any backlash? No, it’s not technologically easy to stop. But I don’t even find anyone complaining about it. At some point, it seems people just decided having to click an X to look at content was acceptable, or even actually started clicking on them and thus encouraging them.
Apparently, a lot of people just ignore them. They can’t ignore other ads, and so use Adblock. But an ad asking you to subscribe to their newsletter? It can popup over the content, and you don’t notice or care.
That’s what I don’t get.
I started getting these 3 days ago from “Clock Hand”, only on Kijiji though.(so far:mad:)