CNET News.com Notices Netscape 7.01Friday December 13th, 2002fondacio writes: "Three days after its release, CNET News.com has an article about Netscape 7.01, mainly focusing on the decision to include the pop-up blocker this time, which was the main point of criticism in their original review." MacCentral published an article about the release a few days ago. UPDATE! ElectricNews.net also has an report about Netscape's pop-up blocking abilities. There's a similar article at PCWorld.com. The article is all about pop-ups. It's amazing how much we hear about pop-ups these days. It's equally amazing how few people know about the easiest way to zap them. A Ctrl+w will close the current window in focus, including a pop-up. This works at least on Windows and in KDE. There is never a need to race after a pop-up with your mouse or to drag an oversized window to find the "close" button, no matter which browser you're using. (Of course it's still cool that Mozilla can just just block them altogether.) While popups are probably very easy to block via code in Mozilla, how easy will it be to make something that does auto click thru? That, or those big annoying flash things that walk around screen are going to be the next big advertising form. Obviously uninstalling the MacroMedia Advertisement Player (flash..) fixes one of those problems, but annoying click thru's are going to be very difficult to automate around. oh, expect way more filtering-options in all browsers soon! One of the next in mozilla will be to manage which servers are allowed to start any specific plugin. blacklisting/whitelisting domains or IPs for plugins seems relatively easy to program, but that doesnt do a think about click-thrus where you cant get to any content without finding the No Thanks button down at the bottom someplace to continue to the next page. Mozilla needs a way to fetch the click-thru page, locate the URL of the real content that follows, and then fetch that page, without ever fetching any images or other junk on the click-thru page, or even beginning to render it. That seems magical from a programming standpoint, however, so much less likely to happen :( I'm very familiar with ctrl-w and I find it not even a remotely satisfactory way to get rid of pop-ups. It's criminal that it took this long for browsers to include such an simple, obvious and desired feature. |