Quote:
Still wondering what it is, under the hood, that allows this to even be possible, let alone so hard to prevent.

Beats me. You wouldn't catch Fresco doing that stuff: it came with a toolbar button for enable/disable Javascript as standard. Also it deliberately disobeyed all the "no toolbar, no scrollbars"-type options that the JS "new window" call could specify. I dimly remember a dialog box saying something like "A JavaScript wants to open a new window: allow Y/N", but that might have been in NCFresco -- the set-top-box version -- which runs fullscreen and can't open new windows anyway.

Back in the day, we did find at least one site (bonus.com) that had all its content in a popup, but all its scripts in the main window, so you needed both around at once (and it didn't work at all in NCFresco).

Peter