Disable popup windows & more

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

OK, I'm getting really sick of those pesky popup ads, whether good or bad. And from what I've heard, you're probably feeling the same way! A couple months ago I started trying Google Toolbar's experimental ad-stopper, but it didn't work very well. Probably because most popups are opened onload, not onunload.

There are tons of products out there touting their effectiveness at removing popup ads, but other than the fact that they're using spam to hype themselves, I don't really want to completely disable popup windows. For instance, in my Devotionals section, there are linked references to Bible passages. These open in popup windows, and I like it that way. (By the way, they will open normally in the browser if Javascript is turned off, or there is some popup blocker in place, so you can still see the verses.)

My solution? A different browser.

Late-model browsers have gotten much, much better at supporting CSS standards. So where it was a no-brainer to use IE over Navigator, it's now much less of an issue. Navigator, Mozilla, and Opera are all great browsers that render pages much like IE does. I read somewhere (sorry I don't remember, otherwise I'd link to it) that Opera can disable popup windows - cool! But it disables them complelely. Besides, Opera has ads built-in, aka Juno. Yuck.

I didn't really want all the extra stuff Netscape Navigator gets stuffed with, so I tried Mozilla. Good move. Mozilla has a great option to disable unrequested popups. This means when I click to open a popup, it opens. But script in pages will not load them automatically - brilliant! This is great; and it works 100% - I've been browsing ad-free ever since!

The added bonus is that Mozilla is a superb browser, all up to date with CSS and standards. It's much more precise in its rendering than IE, making it both necessary and easy for me to pinpoint problems with my layout and fix them. I've actually managed to get my homepage to Bobby A Status and meet the US Goverment's Section 508 guidelines - not bad! The only downside is that it doesn't have IE's "edit mode" for in-browser WSIWYG editing, and also doesn't support IE's "getExpression" functions.

To make it easier on myself, I loaded up the Internet Explorer skin, so I was in a familiar environment, but I like Orbit better. I also love the tabbed browsing, instead of having to deal with windows all over the place (Opera does this, too).

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