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Rather, to discuss the programattical reasons why popup blocking is so poorly implemented in the base web browsers. I'm still not completely sure why.


I'll take a shot at this... Because the real issue is distinguishing between what's a necessary popup and what's not. Granted most useful popups have been replaced, but not all. And that's not a core function of a web browser. Also, there are so many ways to create a new window or tab...

Without actually doing the analysis it seems that the routine to open a window is going to be the same whether it's a popup or starting the browser, so just NOPing that isn't a good idea.

The old-school method was to supress new windows that were part of a "onPageLoad" method, and while that used to work, just like anything, it's an arms race and the advertisers care more about making it work than people who are trying to deal with an entire browser.

Almost all popups need to load content from somewhere, and the URL for that content is not very different from ad blocking, which is all about choosing good content over bad content.

Between Adblock and the basic UI options in Firefox I haven't had a problem with popups, and the rare occcasions when there's a popup I do want that adblock blocks, most of the time I figure it couldn't have been that important anyway, rather than clicking once to turn off adblock, clicking the link, and then clicking adblock back on.

So maybe consider the problem in a different domain, that of content discrimination?

--Nathan