Mozilla Testing Block for New Popups

Mozilla developers have begun testing a patch for Firefox that blocks a new breed of pop-up advertisements that bypass traditional pop-up blockers. Instead of being spawned by JavaScript code, the new pop-ups load from within third-party plug-ins such as Macromedia Flash or Sun's Java.

Although Firefox has had the capability to block such ads since 1.0, no option existed to enable it. The beta patch, which loads as a Firefox extension, changes that and includes a whitelist for sites that require pop-ups from plug-ins. Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler announced the patch in his Web log, asking for feedback from users.