Sunday, February 27th, 2005, 6:21 am
Ad Blocking
Filed under: According to Slashdot, advertisers have devised ways to overcome ad blocking.
Pop-ups can always be blocked if the browser aims to do so — that is if your browser is your friend and does not have its conflicting interests a la Microsoft. This is a race between advertisers and angel Web browser developers. As long as you patch up your browser, you should be on safe grounds. Allow me to explain why.
An advertiser can force download of a pop-up window content. It can also force display. It cannot, however, know if the operating system puts the window in focus, hides it, or sends it a ‘kill’ signal. A smart advertiser will request that you press an object in the pop-up, but again, the operating system or browser can fake it. The spammer-versus-filter analogy might help here.
Related link: Pure-CSS ad blocking for Mozilla Firefox
