Blocking Popups (Clicking on Text) in Firefox?

October 23, 2008 2:01 PM

I'm using Firefox 3. I'm getting popup ads when I click on text (non ads), like at Salon.com. For example, while reading: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/23/campaign_myths/ If I click on the text, there'll be a popup ad. I have popups turned off in Firefox, but that isn't working for this particular case. Any help?
posted by fe2dell to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Use a program like AdAware to check if your computer is infected with ad-generating malware.

You may also want to try the AdBlock Extension for Firefox. It does an excellent job of stripping advertising from the internet.
posted by sindark at 2:06 PM on October 23, 2008

My Adblock Plus subscription has a built-in regular expression that filters out http://images.salon.com/lib/hbxmedia.js and http://images.salon.com/lib/hbx.js. My guess is those are the responsible scripts, FWIW. It whitelists judo.salon.com* which appears to be an ad server but I can't replicate your problem, so I don't think that's the offending script.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:07 PM on October 23, 2008

Text meaning the actual article itself, not any ads of course.
posted by fe2dell at 2:11 PM on October 23, 2008

Inspector.Gadget: THANK YOU! That worked perfect!!! :)
posted by fe2dell at 2:22 PM on October 23, 2008

No problem, glad it worked. I'm not sure why the ABP EasyList maintainer blocks one of Salon's ad servers but not the other...it maybe that the judo.salon.com one also serves flash videos or something and the hbx* one is just obnoxious click grabbing.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:29 PM on October 23, 2008