After living joyfully without fear of pop up ads for quite some time now (between Safari and Firefox's excellent pop up killing powers,) I have been dismayed recently to see these ads appear again. Although I guess they are more 'pop under' than 'pop up'. The trick they have found to beat the blockers is to spawn the new windows using our old (*cough*) friend Flash. Ah, isn't Flash wonderful?

I don't know if Macromedia (Flash's parent company) is going to do anything about this. Or, it would be nice if the browser makers would let you keep Flash installed, but toggled off, and then let you activate it if you really want for a specific site through a menu item (I hear Omniweb can do this.) But until someone does something to fix this problem you will either have to live with some pop under ads once again, or, and I admit I am severely tempted, uninstall Flash. Thanks to Macromedia for at least providing these uninstaller programs (for all platforms.)
- jim 3-10-2005 6:51 pm

I run firefox w/o flash, and have exploder availavle w/ flash for dealing with mandatory flash sites.
- mark 3-10-2005 7:01 pm


That seems like a good idea Mark. I just saw this though: Alternative browser spyware infects IE. So it looks like IE can be targeted by spyware even when browsing with firefox (assuming you have java turned on in firefox.)

Not sure how big of a deal this is. Certainly it won't matter at all until you go to view a flash site with IE.
- jim 3-11-2005 10:06 pm





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