One of the much-touted features of Firefox and Safari and the likes is that they automatically block popup windows out of the box.
Unfortunately, popups is a moving target (and a fast one at that). Advertisers are finding ways around popup windows only months after you thought they were gone for good.
Even more concerning is the growing prevelance of popup floating divs. As far as your browser is concerned, this popup div is simply part of a site's interactive content.
Beating popup windows is simple. Browser manufacturers take a hard-line stance, simply saying "You can't have ANYTHING open in a new window". Simple. Sure, you'll break some sites, but it's a price I'm willing to pay (besides, sites that force you to open links in a new window annoy the hell out of me).
Beating the popup floating div isn't going to be as easy... I wonder how Mozilla's developers will get around this problem...
Comments
Good point. It will be impossible to stop this. My company's site uses a div that is set at the bottom of the screen. In standard compliant browsers I use CSS and in IE I use Javascript so there is 2 different ways already.