9 ms·

Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups

395 points by coldpie 10mo ago

darthoctopus 9mo ago
I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…
- s3graham 9mo ago
  It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more. It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
  - quink 9mo ago
    SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.
    - hagbard_c 9mo ago
      It works on Firefox on Android as well, as do many other FF extensions. It won't work on a fruit phone [1], the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487
      - wolvoleo 9mo ago
        Yeah I hope Mozilla will make a full version for the EU which is possible now. But Apple is making it as hard as possible for them, there was an article about that only recently.
    - hayleox 9mo ago
      SponsorBlock is available on just about every type of device these days -- works perfectly on Android with YouTube ReVanced. The options on iOS are naturally a bit more limited, but apparently it's possible on a jailbroken device (or through some other slightly-janky methods on non-jailbroken devices): https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS
  - econ 9mo ago
    It's just nihilism, we can put the urls on dht when we are ready.
  - IshKebab 9mo ago
    Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes. I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip. I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does. I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      Really, YouTube should just auto skip sponsor segments for premium users. As it is Premium isn't worth it. Because you still get bombarded with ads despite paying to stop them. Of course it will hurt the content creators but they are already getting paid much more per view by premium customers! So showing sponsor segments as well is double dipping.
      - IshKebab 9mo ago
        Yeah I agree, but it's understandable that YouTube are treading lightly here. It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments full stop, but that wouldn't go down well with content creators!
        encom 9mo ago
        >It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments But is it? Sponsor segments is view time, same as anything else.
        IshKebab 9mo ago
        Yeah definitely. YouTube doesn't get a cut from sponsor segments. They would much rather that the only way to make money for creators was through them. I would not be entirely surprised if in future they launch an "official" sponsorship system where the sponsored section appears like an ad (you can't skip it without adblock/premium), they take a cut and require all videos to use it. I bet the only reason they haven't (other than the open revolt it would cause) is that it would just push creators to blend their sponsorship into the entire video instead of having a nicely separated segment that you can easily skip.
jmclnx 9mo ago
I noticed the same on a site I have been reading for over 30 years. I am about to abandon that site. Hope this issue is solved.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
  Try disabling JS for that site.
  - jmclnx 9mo ago
    I use noscript, if I disable the site itself, it is unreadable :)
tantivy 9mo ago
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web. Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
- mrtesthah 9mo ago
  Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.
  - somerandomqaguy 9mo ago
    The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.
    - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
      [flagged]
  - encom 9mo ago
    The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.
      - 9mo ago
wincy 9mo ago
If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements. If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install. It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
- godelski 9mo ago
  Fyi, ublock is on iOS now
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked. I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
- rsync 9mo ago
  Install the dns4eu configuration profile with adblocking: https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH ... and block all of it on a system level beneath Safari.
rcxdude 9mo ago
Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).
- krackers 9mo ago
  easyist annoyances filter should take care of a lot of these.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jart 9mo ago
They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.
- dwroberts 9mo ago
  These models will start serving ads inline with results soon. All of the major players in this technology are still ad companies
  - jrs235 9mo ago
    Or worse, be [secretly] biased towards sponsored answers/solutions. There's a reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated.
    - Ferret7446 9mo ago
      I hate to continue this tangent, but I have to point out that the reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated is because Russia/China having a monopoly on AI is bad. Had we restricted nuclear weapons development, we would not be able to have this conversation.
      - jrs235 9mo ago
        Regulating publicly consumed/available AI doesn't need to restrict private/non-public trained/consumed AI.
- chrysoprace 9mo ago
  You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.
- 9mo ago
SunshineTheCat 9mo ago
I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website. A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on. If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
- analogpixel 9mo ago
  Oh hi, I noticed you closed the live video window I opened up, let me open that up again for you. Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again. Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.
  - Tzk 9mo ago
    Also: Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
    - FergusArgyll 9mo ago
      Seriously, I've seen videos that cannot be closed without zapper mode as far as I can tell
  - chrismorgan 9mo ago
    You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
  - quesera 9mo ago
    This generalizes to "Oh, I see you're running JavaScript. Let me harass you in all the ways I can think of until you relent and act according to my will instead of your own". ... and should be treated with exactly the amount of respect or deference it would be in real life -- avoid (don't follow links to sketchy sites), de-escalate or ignore (close the tab and walk away), or defend (block JavaScript).
benregenspan 9mo ago
> Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
- compass_copium 9mo ago
  >sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Porn and privacy sites. Especially the latter still do it a LOT and they will just block you if you block the popups.
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      Sorry I meant piracy sites. Not privacy. Autocorrect...
      - compass_copium 9mo ago
        Yes, true! I forgot about ROM sites, they were the worst offenders
- lmm 9mo ago
  On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.
  - 9mo ago
lapcat 9mo ago
The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
- econ 9mo ago
  Only allow dom/css changes in response to user action.
  - lapcat 9mo ago
    Like... scrolling down the page? Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
    - econ 9mo ago
      Have a nice small notification that a "pop-up" was blocked. Wouldn't you like to see it now wouldn't you?
  - lesuorac 9mo ago
    "Click here to prove you're human" Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.
    - econ 9mo ago
      You can do that when the page loads. Scroll or timer events could require a non intrusive permission dialog.
gethly 9mo ago
i even have popup blocker extension in ff and it's not working well at all.
chrsw 9mo ago
I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
- The_President 9mo ago
  Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”
pentagrama 9mo ago
On uBlock Origin settings > Filter lists > Annoyances Check all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups. [1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Yup this works really well. Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
  - nikanj 9mo ago
    This is easily solved by closing the tab and never returning
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      Well I don't always have that choice, sometimes I need to buy something etc
kstrauser 9mo ago
Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon. I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
asadotzler 9mo ago
Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.
- lwansbrough 9mo ago
  The solution may just have to be technological literacy.
  - zx8080 9mo ago
    It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?
    - left-struck 9mo ago
      It requires literacy to know that that’s an option and to know why it’s a good idea. I’ve met plenty of tech illiterate but otherwise smart people who just use edge, or a mobile phone and whatever browser it has as a default.
    - black_puppydog 9mo ago
      GP mentioned a couple of user filters. If that's not technological literacy I have an SAP migration to sell you.
    - dpkirchner 9mo ago
      You need to be savvy enough to know how to deal with the inevitable "broken" site you run across (ideally by leaving and never returning, but sometimes that isn't an option).
    - g947o 9mo ago
      Try asking random people on NYC street if they have heard of Firefox and uBlock Origin.
    - 9mo ago
wolvoleo 9mo ago
UBlock origin is pretty good at blocking those in-page popups though. You do have to add the optional Annoyances blocklists for that though.
cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
Anything so heavily abused deserves to default to off. But good luck convincing Firefox to do that, let alone the others. Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird. Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.
mxmilkiib 9mo ago
maybe the intro etc of absurd.org could somehow happen again. a very artsy artefact of a website that utilised popups (and Java) at certain points https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...
childintime 9mo ago
Popups and Cloudflare stepping in.
zx8080 9mo ago
Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business. We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine. It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.
- FergusArgyll 9mo ago
  Lite's really not that bad. I agree you'd rather ff and the full ublock but it's still a vastly better experience
bambax 9mo ago
Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.
- maest 9mo ago
  Adblock won't block the "subscribe for 2 free articles" popups.
  - laristine 9mo ago
    Nor will pop-up blocking I'm afraid.
    - asddubs 9mo ago
      the whole point of the article is that browsers should try to block popups that don't literally open a new window too. Although I doubt it's really feasible without doing it on a one-by-one basis like ad blockers
      - laristine 9mo ago
        Of course, I don't disagree with you. But OP tried to refute the fact in their parent comment that using adblock is generally better than relying on browser's pop-up blocking. However, adblock does no worse than pop-up blocking in the specific case of non-window pop-ups, making it irrelevant in the context. And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.
  - bambax 9mo ago
    Of course it will. At least the second time, after you tell it that '.popup-subscribe-modal' should never be seen again.
    - pmdr 9mo ago
      It's not '.popup-subscribe-modal', it's often a random string spit out at build time that changes with every deployment.
thinkloop 9mo ago
Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution: - replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy. - eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks. - automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar
swiftcoder 9mo ago
Ironically, they do still block the actual pop-up window my bank tries to spawn during 2fac sign-in All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on
greatgib 9mo ago
For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites. When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them. What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
- encom 9mo ago
  This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email? Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop. It's all so tiresome.
Tzk 9mo ago
No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are. Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”… Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
- f1shy 9mo ago
  The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait) I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5. The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat. Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
  - elcapitan 9mo ago
    That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time. Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
    - LoganDark 9mo ago
      I've started to encounter news outlets / etc that use JavaScript to load most of the article. So if you don't have it enabled you get like one or two paragraphs and that's it. Usually I didn't care about the article that much anyway, but it's still annoying.
    - Tanoc 9mo ago
      I've been using NoScript since 2016, and the number of things that get loaded in via Javascript has sextupled since then. This isn't an exaggeration, some websites like Wal-Mart's went from five extra domains to thirty. Going to Fossil's website to look at a watch for a Christmas gift this year, the domain whitelist panel for NoScript was so long I actually had to scroll down because there were just that many. And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window. Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur. I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.
butz 9mo ago
Reader view works pretty nicely against most modal annoyances.
1313ed01 9mo ago
NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.
miika 9mo ago
It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies. Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow. Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
- Vinnl 9mo ago
  We have that (first DoNotTrack, now Global Privacy Control). Turns out bad karma doesn't really affect website behaviour. (GPC has some legal teeth though, and might get more, so perhaps that will help.)
- sharperguy 9mo ago
  i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.
sixthDot 9mo ago
The bigest anoyance nowadays (in the EU at least) is rather the cookie policy agreement. "View the list of our 258 partners", etc.
- pmdr 9mo ago
  I find the Consent-O-Matic extension pretty good in dealing with that.
  - encom 9mo ago
    I refuse to engage with EU cookie banners, even programmatically.
- 8fingerlouie 9mo ago
  Use private mode browsing, click the easy option of allow all, and rejoice that cookies are cleared when you close the tab.
  - ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
    The cookies will still be correlated with each other, and your behavior will still be sent offsite for aggregation by ad identity companies, then linked back to your non-private browser behavior via IP, or browser fingerprinting, or any site you log into, etc.
black_puppydog 9mo ago
A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...
- pmdr 9mo ago
  I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.
tedk-42 9mo ago
_continue without supporting_ is a button i like to press As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense. Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
eloisius 9mo ago
I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
renewiltord 9mo ago
People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it. Be better.
_el1s7 9mo ago
The author seems to be confusing third party ad pop-ups with promotional modals from websites.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  The author seems to think there's no practical difference to the user.
chrisjj 9mo ago
> It is definitely a hard problem to distinguish between “legitimate” pop-ups and advertising pop-ups. I note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.
drewfax 9mo ago
Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas. It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  In other words: browsers should just implement uBlock Origin by default.
  - ycombinatrix 9mo ago
    Firefox does already have some tracker blocking built in, though it would be fantastic to import arbitrary filter lists. Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.
    - extra88 9mo ago
      Safari (desktop and mobile) also has tracker blocking built in. "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Hide IP address from trackers" are two settings it has; I think the first is checked by default, I don't remember about the other. In the DevTools network pane, it shows requests to known trackers, like Google Tag Manager, being blocked. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
      - DetectDefect 9mo ago
        Try using Amazon in Safari sometime (in Lockdown Mode, no less): non-stop ads (some which flash), sponsored results dominating the first page of search, random Dufus pop-ups forcing AI. You can hide "distracting" elements but they just appear again later. Safari is not a user-friendly browser.
        extra88 9mo ago
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
Turning off JS goes a long way towards avoiding most of the ad/popup problem. I just turn it off for bad sites, keep it on for most.
pwdisswordfishy 9mo ago
How much time until websites start rendering everything to <canvas>?
sllabres 9mo ago
My method when such a pop-up occurs: I'll vote with my feet and immediately close the sites windows to reward them (at lest 95% of the time)
therealmarv 9mo ago
I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years. The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.
shevy-java 9mo ago
I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor. I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good. I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders). Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?
- graemep 9mo ago
  > I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor. To see it on python.org I had to enable JS (using noscript) AND disable uBlock Origin. > then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good. Use Firefox
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    Or use other chromium based browsers! Thorium still has working uBlock origin!
    - 9mo ago
diego_moita 9mo ago
Either Firefox + Ublock Origin or Brave Browser. Case solved.
looneysquash 9mo ago
That's because the biggest ad selling companies make or fund the web browsers.
drnick1 9mo ago
Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.
tejohnso 9mo ago
Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.
- bandrami 9mo ago
  Isn't the problem that if everybody started using it most Web sites couldn't keep existing?
  - Ylpertnodi 9mo ago
    Their problem, not mine.
  - amanaplanacanal 9mo ago
    Most web sites are crap, honestly. Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
  - junto 9mo ago
    There was a time in the mid 90’s where we could have gone down one of two paths. “Free” ad-supported-you-are-the-product”, or digital micropayments. The latter was hard, and didn’t mature until 20 years later. Instead we got the shitfest internet we see today. What would the internet look like today if every visitor could drop micro-donations on content creators by simply clicking a donate button in their browser or on the website to support the content creators they appreciated? Webrings led to DoubleClick. DoubleClick led to Google Ads. That led us to Facebook and the hyper-invasive internet we have today where everyone worldwide is profiled for their ad-worth. Fuck this timeline.
reactordev 9mo ago
After 30 years I’m convinced that the web is nothing more than Nordstroms. Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting. Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits. Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits. Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions. I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance. We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed. This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.
- quesera 9mo ago
  Nordstroms has famously good customer service, though. More like K-Mart, but unfortunately, not dead yet.
deadbabe 9mo ago
Soemtimes I dream of an LLM infused browser, which will first pull the HTML for a given URL, then filter out all the BS and just give you a clean readable version, without you ever seeing the original page.
- chrsw 9mo ago
  This is the only thing I want in an "AI" browser. It's even something I'd pay for.
EMM_386 9mo ago
You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues. I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine. It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives. I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.
dbrother 9mo ago
Isn't there extension's that block this?
nine_k 9mo ago
There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case. The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.) I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia. If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.
- quesera 9mo ago
  > There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case. Not sure if I'm misunderstanding the intent of this sentence, but I have not seen a popup in my web browsers for ... so long I can't remember the last time it happened? Years certainly, maybe double-digit years.
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    It is trivial to block "window.open". It is not trivial to block a pop-up div that obscures content, as shown multiple times in the article.
    - quesera 9mo ago
      WFM?
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Groxx 9mo ago
If there's going to be an LLM in my browser whether or not I ask for it, this is probably what it should be handling for me. "Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.
hollerith 9mo ago
Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., to refuse to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that. Yes, a few web site would become unusable under that setting, but the trade-off would be worth it to me. (Better would be if position:fixed had never been introduced.)
dizhn 9mo ago
Popup Blocker Strict is the best popup blocker I've found. It still misses a tiny fraction but is much better than a browser's own setting or ublock origin alone. https://github.com/schomery/popup-blocker https://github.com/schomery/popup-blocker
8jef 9mo ago
Please consider donating some of your disposable income to the Ladybird project, at ladybird dot org, while using one of mozilla's browser fork. Complaining about ads appearing on adwares will only lead you so far.
nephihaha 9mo ago
YouTube is doing this.
duxup 9mo ago
Not just annoying, these kinds of behaviors seem to feed scam companies. The ads I get on Youtube ... Facebook doesn't care about scam companies as long as they get paid. Big tech and scams are becoming a hand in hand thing.
heraldgeezer 9mo ago
Firefox + ublock origin o7
musicale 9mo ago
The iron laws of web encrapification: 1. Every new feature will be used to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements. 2. When browser features are added to protect the user, web designers will do their best to subvert them to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements. 3. When an advertising company controls your web browser, the game has been lost.
- musicale 9mo ago
  I guess this hit home for someone.
RyanJB 9mo ago
Just use GrayScaleAdz www.grayscaleadz.com
beeboop0 9mo ago
[dead]
cheesepaint 9mo ago
As much as I dislike popups: I really doubt that there would be a significant user gain for Firefox. I think most users simply do not care about it, especially non-tech-savvy users. Especially since so many people stay on Chrome, despite its efforts to drown ad-blockers.
junto 9mo ago
I now have a Raspberry PI + Pi-hole running on my home network so none of my family see ads any more and nobody has to install any software themselves. You can also add your children’s devices to specific groups with extra block lists, to keep them a bit safer in the internet. I got the Pi 5 to future-proof myself a bit and the entire kit cost about $160 and assembling and installing + configuring the network took 30 minutes. I honestly don’t know why I waited so long to do it. I highly advise. I know it’s not perfect, and you have to do some tweaks around DNS-over-HTTPS but quite honestly it feels like it was the best money I spent last year by far.

395 points by coldpie 10mo ago

I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…

s3graham 9mo ago
It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more. It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
- quink 9mo ago
  SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.
  - hagbard_c 9mo ago
    It works on Firefox on Android as well, as do many other FF extensions. It won't work on a fruit phone [1], the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      Yeah I hope Mozilla will make a full version for the EU which is possible now. But Apple is making it as hard as possible for them, there was an article about that only recently.
  - hayleox 9mo ago
    SponsorBlock is available on just about every type of device these days -- works perfectly on Android with YouTube ReVanced. The options on iOS are naturally a bit more limited, but apparently it's possible on a jailbroken device (or through some other slightly-janky methods on non-jailbroken devices): https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS
- econ 9mo ago
  It's just nihilism, we can put the urls on dht when we are ready.
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes. I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip. I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does. I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Really, YouTube should just auto skip sponsor segments for premium users. As it is Premium isn't worth it. Because you still get bombarded with ads despite paying to stop them. Of course it will hurt the content creators but they are already getting paid much more per view by premium customers! So showing sponsor segments as well is double dipping.
    - IshKebab 9mo ago
      Yeah I agree, but it's understandable that YouTube are treading lightly here. It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments full stop, but that wouldn't go down well with content creators!
      - encom 9mo ago
        >It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments But is it? Sponsor segments is view time, same as anything else.
        IshKebab 9mo ago
        Yeah definitely. YouTube doesn't get a cut from sponsor segments. They would much rather that the only way to make money for creators was through them. I would not be entirely surprised if in future they launch an "official" sponsorship system where the sponsored section appears like an ad (you can't skip it without adblock/premium), they take a cut and require all videos to use it. I bet the only reason they haven't (other than the open revolt it would cause) is that it would just push creators to blend their sponsorship into the entire video instead of having a nicely separated segment that you can easily skip.

jmclnx 9mo ago

I noticed the same on a site I have been reading for over 30 years. I am about to abandon that site. Hope this issue is solved.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
Try disabling JS for that site.
- jmclnx 9mo ago
  I use noscript, if I disable the site itself, it is unreadable :)

tantivy 9mo ago

I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web. Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?

mrtesthah 9mo ago
Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.
- somerandomqaguy 9mo ago
  The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.
  - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- encom 9mo ago
  The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.
    - 9mo ago

wincy 9mo ago

If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements. If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install. It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.

godelski 9mo ago
Fyi, ublock is on iOS now
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked. I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
rsync 9mo ago
Install the dns4eu configuration profile with adblocking: https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH ... and block all of it on a system level beneath Safari.

rcxdude 9mo ago

Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).

krackers 9mo ago
easyist annoyances filter should take care of a lot of these.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jart 9mo ago

They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.

dwroberts 9mo ago
These models will start serving ads inline with results soon. All of the major players in this technology are still ad companies
- jrs235 9mo ago
  Or worse, be [secretly] biased towards sponsored answers/solutions. There's a reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated.
  - Ferret7446 9mo ago
    I hate to continue this tangent, but I have to point out that the reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated is because Russia/China having a monopoly on AI is bad. Had we restricted nuclear weapons development, we would not be able to have this conversation.
    - jrs235 9mo ago
      Regulating publicly consumed/available AI doesn't need to restrict private/non-public trained/consumed AI.
chrysoprace 9mo ago
You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.
9mo ago

SunshineTheCat 9mo ago

I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website. A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on. If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.

analogpixel 9mo ago
Oh hi, I noticed you closed the live video window I opened up, let me open that up again for you. Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again. Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.
- Tzk 9mo ago
  Also: Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
  - FergusArgyll 9mo ago
    Seriously, I've seen videos that cannot be closed without zapper mode as far as I can tell
- chrismorgan 9mo ago
  You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
- quesera 9mo ago
  This generalizes to "Oh, I see you're running JavaScript. Let me harass you in all the ways I can think of until you relent and act according to my will instead of your own". ... and should be treated with exactly the amount of respect or deference it would be in real life -- avoid (don't follow links to sketchy sites), de-escalate or ignore (close the tab and walk away), or defend (block JavaScript).

benregenspan 9mo ago

> Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.

compass_copium 9mo ago
>sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Porn and privacy sites. Especially the latter still do it a LOT and they will just block you if you block the popups.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Sorry I meant piracy sites. Not privacy. Autocorrect...
    - compass_copium 9mo ago
      Yes, true! I forgot about ROM sites, they were the worst offenders
lmm 9mo ago
On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.
- 9mo ago

lapcat 9mo ago

The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.

econ 9mo ago
Only allow dom/css changes in response to user action.
- lapcat 9mo ago
  Like... scrolling down the page? Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
  - econ 9mo ago
    Have a nice small notification that a "pop-up" was blocked. Wouldn't you like to see it now wouldn't you?
- lesuorac 9mo ago
  "Click here to prove you're human" Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.
  - econ 9mo ago
    You can do that when the page loads. Scroll or timer events could require a non intrusive permission dialog.

gethly 9mo ago

i even have popup blocker extension in ff and it's not working well at all.

chrsw 9mo ago

I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.

The_President 9mo ago
Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”

pentagrama 9mo ago

On uBlock Origin settings > Filter lists > Annoyances Check all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups. [1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA

wolvoleo 9mo ago
Yup this works really well. Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
- nikanj 9mo ago
  This is easily solved by closing the tab and never returning
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Well I don't always have that choice, sometimes I need to buy something etc

kstrauser 9mo ago

Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon. I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.

asadotzler 9mo ago

Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.

lwansbrough 9mo ago
The solution may just have to be technological literacy.
- zx8080 9mo ago
  It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?
  - left-struck 9mo ago
    It requires literacy to know that that’s an option and to know why it’s a good idea. I’ve met plenty of tech illiterate but otherwise smart people who just use edge, or a mobile phone and whatever browser it has as a default.
  - black_puppydog 9mo ago
    GP mentioned a couple of user filters. If that's not technological literacy I have an SAP migration to sell you.
  - dpkirchner 9mo ago
    You need to be savvy enough to know how to deal with the inevitable "broken" site you run across (ideally by leaving and never returning, but sometimes that isn't an option).
  - g947o 9mo ago
    Try asking random people on NYC street if they have heard of Firefox and uBlock Origin.
  - 9mo ago

wolvoleo 9mo ago

UBlock origin is pretty good at blocking those in-page popups though. You do have to add the optional Annoyances blocklists for that though.

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago

Anything so heavily abused deserves to default to off. But good luck convincing Firefox to do that, let alone the others. Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird. Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.

mxmilkiib 9mo ago

maybe the intro etc of absurd.org could somehow happen again. a very artsy artefact of a website that utilised popups (and Java) at certain points https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...

childintime 9mo ago

Popups and Cloudflare stepping in.

zx8080 9mo ago

Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business. We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine. It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.

zelphirkalt 9mo ago
Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.
FergusArgyll 9mo ago
Lite's really not that bad. I agree you'd rather ff and the full ublock but it's still a vastly better experience

bambax 9mo ago

Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.

maest 9mo ago
Adblock won't block the "subscribe for 2 free articles" popups.
- laristine 9mo ago
  Nor will pop-up blocking I'm afraid.
  - asddubs 9mo ago
    the whole point of the article is that browsers should try to block popups that don't literally open a new window too. Although I doubt it's really feasible without doing it on a one-by-one basis like ad blockers
    - laristine 9mo ago
      Of course, I don't disagree with you. But OP tried to refute the fact in their parent comment that using adblock is generally better than relying on browser's pop-up blocking. However, adblock does no worse than pop-up blocking in the specific case of non-window pop-ups, making it irrelevant in the context. And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.
- bambax 9mo ago
  Of course it will. At least the second time, after you tell it that '.popup-subscribe-modal' should never be seen again.
  - pmdr 9mo ago
    It's not '.popup-subscribe-modal', it's often a random string spit out at build time that changes with every deployment.

thinkloop 9mo ago

Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution: - replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy. - eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks. - automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar

swiftcoder 9mo ago

Ironically, they do still block the actual pop-up window my bank tries to spawn during 2fac sign-in All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on

greatgib 9mo ago

For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites. When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them. What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.

encom 9mo ago
This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email? Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop. It's all so tiresome.

Tzk 9mo ago

No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are. Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”… Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.

f1shy 9mo ago
The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait) I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5. The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat. Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
- elcapitan 9mo ago
  That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time. Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
  - LoganDark 9mo ago
    I've started to encounter news outlets / etc that use JavaScript to load most of the article. So if you don't have it enabled you get like one or two paragraphs and that's it. Usually I didn't care about the article that much anyway, but it's still annoying.
  - Tanoc 9mo ago
    I've been using NoScript since 2016, and the number of things that get loaded in via Javascript has sextupled since then. This isn't an exaggeration, some websites like Wal-Mart's went from five extra domains to thirty. Going to Fossil's website to look at a watch for a Christmas gift this year, the domain whitelist panel for NoScript was so long I actually had to scroll down because there were just that many. And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window. Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur. I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.

butz 9mo ago

Reader view works pretty nicely against most modal annoyances.

1313ed01 9mo ago

NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.

miika 9mo ago

It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies. Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow. Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?

Vinnl 9mo ago
We have that (first DoNotTrack, now Global Privacy Control). Turns out bad karma doesn't really affect website behaviour. (GPC has some legal teeth though, and might get more, so perhaps that will help.)
sharperguy 9mo ago
i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.

sixthDot 9mo ago

The bigest anoyance nowadays (in the EU at least) is rather the cookie policy agreement. "View the list of our 258 partners", etc.

pmdr 9mo ago
I find the Consent-O-Matic extension pretty good in dealing with that.
- encom 9mo ago
  I refuse to engage with EU cookie banners, even programmatically.
8fingerlouie 9mo ago
Use private mode browsing, click the easy option of allow all, and rejoice that cookies are cleared when you close the tab.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
  The cookies will still be correlated with each other, and your behavior will still be sent offsite for aggregation by ad identity companies, then linked back to your non-private browser behavior via IP, or browser fingerprinting, or any site you log into, etc.

black_puppydog 9mo ago

A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...

pmdr 9mo ago
I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.

tedk-42 9mo ago

_continue without supporting_ is a button i like to press As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense. Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.

eloisius 9mo ago

I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.

renewiltord 9mo ago

People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it. Be better.

_el1s7 9mo ago

The author seems to be confusing third party ad pop-ups with promotional modals from websites.

chrisjj 9mo ago
The author seems to think there's no practical difference to the user.

chrisjj 9mo ago

> It is definitely a hard problem to distinguish between “legitimate” pop-ups and advertising pop-ups. I note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.

drewfax 9mo ago

Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas. It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.

reddalo 9mo ago
In other words: browsers should just implement uBlock Origin by default.
- ycombinatrix 9mo ago
  Firefox does already have some tracker blocking built in, though it would be fantastic to import arbitrary filter lists. Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.
  - extra88 9mo ago
    Safari (desktop and mobile) also has tracker blocking built in. "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Hide IP address from trackers" are two settings it has; I think the first is checked by default, I don't remember about the other. In the DevTools network pane, it shows requests to known trackers, like Google Tag Manager, being blocked. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
    - DetectDefect 9mo ago
      Try using Amazon in Safari sometime (in Lockdown Mode, no less): non-stop ads (some which flash), sponsored results dominating the first page of search, random Dufus pop-ups forcing AI. You can hide "distracting" elements but they just appear again later. Safari is not a user-friendly browser.
      - extra88 9mo ago

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago

Turning off JS goes a long way towards avoiding most of the ad/popup problem. I just turn it off for bad sites, keep it on for most.

pwdisswordfishy 9mo ago

How much time until websites start rendering everything to <canvas>?

sllabres 9mo ago

My method when such a pop-up occurs: I'll vote with my feet and immediately close the sites windows to reward them (at lest 95% of the time)

therealmarv 9mo ago

I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years. The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.

shevy-java 9mo ago

I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor. I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good. I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders). Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?

graemep 9mo ago
> I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor. To see it on python.org I had to enable JS (using noscript) AND disable uBlock Origin. > then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good. Use Firefox
- Der_Einzige 9mo ago
  Or use other chromium based browsers! Thorium still has working uBlock origin!
  - 9mo ago

diego_moita 9mo ago

Either Firefox + Ublock Origin or Brave Browser. Case solved.

looneysquash 9mo ago

That's because the biggest ad selling companies make or fund the web browsers.

drnick1 9mo ago

Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.

tejohnso 9mo ago

Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.

bandrami 9mo ago
Isn't the problem that if everybody started using it most Web sites couldn't keep existing?
- Ylpertnodi 9mo ago
  Their problem, not mine.
- amanaplanacanal 9mo ago
  Most web sites are crap, honestly. Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
- junto 9mo ago
  There was a time in the mid 90’s where we could have gone down one of two paths. “Free” ad-supported-you-are-the-product”, or digital micropayments. The latter was hard, and didn’t mature until 20 years later. Instead we got the shitfest internet we see today. What would the internet look like today if every visitor could drop micro-donations on content creators by simply clicking a donate button in their browser or on the website to support the content creators they appreciated? Webrings led to DoubleClick. DoubleClick led to Google Ads. That led us to Facebook and the hyper-invasive internet we have today where everyone worldwide is profiled for their ad-worth. Fuck this timeline.

reactordev 9mo ago

After 30 years I’m convinced that the web is nothing more than Nordstroms. Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting. Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits. Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits. Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions. I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance. We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed. This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.

quesera 9mo ago
Nordstroms has famously good customer service, though. More like K-Mart, but unfortunately, not dead yet.

deadbabe 9mo ago

Soemtimes I dream of an LLM infused browser, which will first pull the HTML for a given URL, then filter out all the BS and just give you a clean readable version, without you ever seeing the original page.

chrsw 9mo ago
This is the only thing I want in an "AI" browser. It's even something I'd pay for.

EMM_386 9mo ago

You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues. I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine. It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives. I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.

dbrother 9mo ago

Isn't there extension's that block this?

nine_k 9mo ago

There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case. The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.) I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia. If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.

quesera 9mo ago
> There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case. Not sure if I'm misunderstanding the intent of this sentence, but I have not seen a popup in my web browsers for ... so long I can't remember the last time it happened? Years certainly, maybe double-digit years.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  It is trivial to block "window.open". It is not trivial to block a pop-up div that obscures content, as shown multiple times in the article.
  - quesera 9mo ago
    WFM?

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Groxx 9mo ago

If there's going to be an LLM in my browser whether or not I ask for it, this is probably what it should be handling for me. "Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.

hollerith 9mo ago

Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., to refuse to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that. Yes, a few web site would become unusable under that setting, but the trade-off would be worth it to me. (Better would be if position:fixed had never been introduced.)

dizhn 9mo ago

Popup Blocker Strict is the best popup blocker I've found. It still misses a tiny fraction but is much better than a browser's own setting or ublock origin alone. https://github.com/schomery/popup-blocker https://github.com/schomery/popup-blocker

8jef 9mo ago

Please consider donating some of your disposable income to the Ladybird project, at ladybird dot org, while using one of mozilla's browser fork. Complaining about ads appearing on adwares will only lead you so far.

nephihaha 9mo ago

YouTube is doing this.

duxup 9mo ago

Not just annoying, these kinds of behaviors seem to feed scam companies. The ads I get on Youtube ... Facebook doesn't care about scam companies as long as they get paid. Big tech and scams are becoming a hand in hand thing.

heraldgeezer 9mo ago

Firefox + ublock origin o7

musicale 9mo ago

The iron laws of web encrapification: 1. Every new feature will be used to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements. 2. When browser features are added to protect the user, web designers will do their best to subvert them to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements. 3. When an advertising company controls your web browser, the game has been lost.

musicale 9mo ago
I guess this hit home for someone.

RyanJB 9mo ago

Just use GrayScaleAdz www.grayscaleadz.com

beeboop0 9mo ago

[dead]

cheesepaint 9mo ago

As much as I dislike popups: I really doubt that there would be a significant user gain for Firefox. I think most users simply do not care about it, especially non-tech-savvy users. Especially since so many people stay on Chrome, despite its efforts to drown ad-blockers.

junto 9mo ago

I now have a Raspberry PI + Pi-hole running on my home network so none of my family see ads any more and nobody has to install any software themselves. You can also add your children’s devices to specific groups with extra block lists, to keep them a bit safer in the internet. I got the Pi 5 to future-proof myself a bit and the entire kit cost about $160 and assembling and installing + configuring the network took 30 minutes. I honestly don’t know why I waited so long to do it. I highly advise. I know it’s not perfect, and you have to do some tweaks around DNS-over-HTTPS but quite honestly it feels like it was the best money I spent last year by far.