Popups are small, medium or full size browser windows that are created using JavaScript on a website. Usually these popups are used for displaying advertisements to the visitor. But sometimes, a few websites use a nasty trick – they create a popup and then change the focus of the popup window. This way the website visitor has no idea that a popup was opened on that website.
While one or two popups are considered okay and can be blocked using the in-built popup blocker of Firefox, some websites create too many popups that cause a big headache to the website visitors. For those sites that use clever tricks to open popups, we can use an add-on called “Popup Blocker (strict)”. With the help of this add-on, we can increase the popup blocking power of Mozilla Firefox browser by many times.
After installing Popup Blocker (strict) in Firefox, we can see its icon in the browser toolbar. When we visit on any website, we can click on this icon and choose the popup settings for that website. Among the settings for a website we can choose to enable the popups globally or on that site.
When we visit a website that shows popups, it will block those popups and display a message – “Popup is requested for…” followed by the URL of the webpages that would be opened in the popups. You can choose to Allow or Deny for those popups. So if there is a popup that you should open, then you can simply click on the Allow button.
In the options for the Popup Blocker (strict) add-on, we can set the maximum number of popup requests for a single page, timeout for displaying each of the popups, and the default action to take when a new popup is requested. It comes with whitelists so that we can add domain names from which the popups are always displayed. Similarly, there are blacklists, popups from which are always blocked.
You can install Popup Blocker (strict) add-on for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-blocker/.