One of the top reasons Firefox (or Opera, for that matter) took off was that it squashed popup ads — grrr… I hate those things. But over the past few months, I’ve started looking down at the taskbar and wondering “when did I open three extra Firefox windows?” Nope, they’re popups. I thought Firefox was supposed to insulate us from those things.

Anyhow, two things.

• In a firefox window, navigate to about:config. Right-click, select “New”, then Integer. Set the name to privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins and the value to 2 (block all popups from plugins). Other values are 0 (allow all popups from plugins), 1 (allow popups, but limit number to dom.popup_maximum), and 3 (block all popups from plugins, including those from whitelist sites).
• Install the adblock Firefox extension and use it.

The combination of these two steps seems to help Firefox more effectively kill popups.