Popup Ads in Firefox

Recently, just in the last week or so, I have been noticing popup ads that are lurking behind my main internet window. When I close the main open window, sometimes there are 2 or 3 popup type ads open on that I have to close. I have been using Firefox for a year or two and have never had this before. None of my preferences have changed - it is still set to block all popup ads. Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be happening? I keep my virus defintions up to date on a daily basis and I am running Windows XP firewall. Thanks.

 

alc,

The authors of the Ads are becoming increasingly creative in bypassing ad blockers. On several Forums, and Weblogs, it appears that Macromedia Flash often seems to be the culprit in the ads appearing, regardless of your settings. FlashBlock, and AdBlock extensions are both recommended. For more information see these two sites:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007682.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6774

 

Impossible to tell. You give no details. Virus definitions have nothing to do with popups. However, there is onw way to protect yourself, and that is to Spyware Blaster , which will block Cookies from IE, Mozilla and Firefox.

In any event some details are required to give an answer.

 

Technically these are called popunder or exit ads.
A popup blocker works by recognizing the script which normally is used to launch a link to a popup ad. There are only a few in use. Popunders work by making it look like you launched the link when you left the page. Thus it is a different script and not blocked. Yes , in time they will update things and add the new script to be blocked, but for now you can either use the adblock extension to block specific ads, the flash block to block flash ads or just accept that the internet is an evolving world and sites need money to stay up and therefore either you need to subscribe and help pay for them or tolerate the ads.

 

I did not understand that they were popunders. These showed up for the first time in FF1.0 PR, and hardly ever after that. There were sent by casalemedia.com, through ar.atwola.com. I blocked at least the casalemedia.com site, and never saw a popunder again. That is why it is important to see what is in the outside of the box. I may not be able to block everything, but given enough information, I can do a pretty good job.

 

I have not seen a popunder in FF ever since I inserted a new hosts file, as described below:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

it takes no more than a minute from start to finish (unless you are on dial-up ). I first took care of popunders by blocking cookies from certain sites, but that only worked part of the time. I would rather not use FF extensions that block certain things like flash, because I'd rather not have to deal with creating a whitelist. The hosts file above just blocks these sites that generate the popunders, so I don't have to actually click on anything at all--ever. They update it every so often, so you can update the one on your comp as often as you wish to.

 

I go directly to the Tools|Options|Privacy|Cookies|Exceptions and type in the website. It has not failed, yet.