Andy Ihnatko of Chicago Sun-Times Still Prefers MozillaTuesday February 11th, 2003Prognathous is back, this time with a link to an article at the Chicago Sun-Times entitled Mozilla still champ when it comes to stopping popups. In this report, columnist Andy Ihnatko goes in search of third-party enhancements to make Internet Explorer competitive with Mozilla and, to a lesser extent, Opera, Chimera and Safari. While Ihnatko largely succeeds in his mission, he concludes that he still likes Mozilla better. This is a good article. Sadly, It looks like he's confused between Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer... He also failed to talk about tabbed browsing. > He also failed to talk about tabbed browsing. Maybe that's because he doesn't like tabbed browsing? A lot of people don't, you know... Luckily, Mozilla lets you ignore the existence of tabbed browsing if you want to. " The only thing that can't be fixed about Explorer is the existence of security holes that can allow no-goodniks to wreak havoc on your PC. I don't blame Microsoft for the fact that they exist. Even Mozilla has had such holes, and like the Mozilla community, Microsoft has issued free patches reasonably quickly. " First of all, AFAIK, Mozilla has never had "such holes" as exist in Internet Explorer. Secondly, Microsoft still has yet to provide patches for some IE holes that have been around for months and months; the Mozilla developers are much quicker to eliminate serious security issues. > First of all, AFAIK, Mozilla has never had "such holes" as exist in Internet Explorer. You should read http://mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html more carefully. Search for "run arbitrary code". There's at least one more of taht type that I can think of that isn't even on that list (that's fixed; no idea about still-open ones). > the Mozilla developers are much quicker to eliminate serious security issues. Usually... but there are some privacy/maybe-security holes that have remained open for years now... See bug 69070, for example. ANDY IHNATKO is one conflicted puppy from what I gleaned from this article. It was almost like he felt that he had to defend the clunky, antiquated, security-prone, privacy-invading IE with all his references to "IE has it, too" add-ons (some quite costly?) I can understand the need to provide balance when comparing browsers but, really, when the majority of the article ends up being a writer's version of "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear", I was left with wondering why he felt he had to go THAT far in the balancing act? While his bottom line was that he preferred using Mozilla it seemed clear that he also preferred "writing" about IE. The new popup-blocker in 1.3b is a big backwards step from the old one. The "block unrequested popups" pref got it 99% right with no effort whatsoever, no matter how many sites I visited. The new "whitelist" means that I have to add every site with popups to it, _and_ that means I get unrequested popups from that site (i.e. ads) as well as requested ones. Gerv *blinks* That is nonsense. The new popup blocker has no effect whatsoever on requested popups. You don't need to add sites using requested popups to the whitelist. You've only gained the _possibility_ to exempt certain sites with unrequested popups (such as a few banking sites which had window.open in the onLoad) from the blocking. Gerv, I've tested this on several old and new profiles and am not seeing any blocking of _requested_ pop-ups. I've seen one other report besides yours (npm.general I think) and so we may have a bug but it doesn't seem to affect most people. Do you have any extensions installed? I know that at least Piro's Tabbed Browser Extension caused the requested popups to fail. He has a new version that works. I think I heard about at at least one other extension breaking popup controls as well but I can't remember which one. Does your problem show up on a new profile with no extensions installed? What OS? --Asa If content is written into an iframe with javascript, the popups are not blocked For example: window.onload = function() { var iFrame = window.frames["tmp"]; iFrame.document.open(); iFrame.document.write("<script>window.open('about:mozilla', '', 'width=100');</script>"); iFrame.document.close(); } <iframe name="tmp"></iframe> Mozilla does not block this popup Just set the following pref: user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000); Beyond that waiting is for the bug to whitelist ways in which popups are allowed to open, rather than blacklisting them. |