Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Experimental pop-up blocking support · 2011-10-03 16:29 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.11a.3162) added support for blocking pop-ups directly, working for Gecko 1.9.2.6 (meaning Firefox 3.6.6) and higher. Filters will not block pop-ups by default, only if the $popup type option is specified. So one can use the filter ||livejasmin.com^$popup to block all pop-up windows opening livejasmin.com. Or one could use ||livejasmin.com^$popup,domain=example.com to prevent only example.com from opening such pop-ups. Pop-ups opened by a page will appear in the list of blockable items and can be blocked from there.

For subscription authors: if you add pop-up blocking rules to your filter list you might want to do it in a backwards compatible way: ||livejasmin.com^$popup,image,~image. This makes sure that the filter doesn’t block anything in Adblock Plus versions that don’t know the $popup option.

Known issues:

• If the pop-up opens in a new window rather than a new tab you will briefly see the pop-up window. This window is closed before running any code and sending any network requests however. Edit: The initial network request is actually being sent but is canceled immediately after receiving HTTP headers.
• For each pop-up opened you will see an additional about:blank entry in the list of blockable items. This is due to how Gecko works, a new window always loads about:blank before loading the actual pop-up target.
• For same-origin pop-ups (opening page and pop-up are from the same host) you will get only the about:blank entry. This is a Gecko limitation, so for such pop-ups you will only be able to block all pop-ups or none.

To the install page

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [4]

1. fan · 2011-10-03 17:09 · #

   Try it soon.thanks for providing this feature.

2. fan · 2011-10-03 17:22 · #

   It seems block a[target=”_blank”] too.It’s troublesome.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Yes, target=“blank” is also a pop-up. I think that this behavior is correct.

3. Marijo · 2011-10-03 17:27 · #

   Finally we can put these pesky pop-ups to rest!
   Thanks, Wladimir!

4. IceDogg · 2011-10-03 19:19 · #

   WOOOOOT!! I’m very excited about this one. I’ve used another add-on to help with this but I would rather it all be in one add-on. Thanks so much for doing this Wladimir!!! I’m not playing around I really am excited about this.

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