The Death of Firefox and Plugins?

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Jay Daniels <tux at myt60.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 08:31 -0500, Samuel Thurston, III wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Jay Daniels <tux at myt60.net> wrote

>> isn't the popup notification just a little band that drops from under
>> the bookmarks toolbar, with a button that lets you open the popup?  Is
>> that really so intrusive?
>>

>
> It depends on how the pop-up window was called.  If you are on a
> shipping site like usps etc, there is no notification that the popup was
> blocked and you are automatically charged yet you didn't get to print
> anything!  Furthermore, if your clicking through paypal to build
> shipping label, you cannot easily specify which sites to allow pop-ups
> from.

Stop right there.  Tools->options, content tab, The first check box is
"block popups" and there is a button to the right marked "manage
exceptions" or something like that.  Click it, and there's a dialog
that lets you add urls.

But i've used USPS and paypal, and never experienced this problem you
have.  I think you may have something else going on.

>
> Pop-up blockers should never block pop-up links that the user clicks on,
> but they do.  In other words, if the pop-up was called by a web
> application or javascript that was called by the user clicking on a
> link, it should not block any pop-ups.  That would be more difficult to
> design than todays simple "white-list" pop-up blockers like the ones
> built into browsers.

People don't always know that clicking something will open a pop-up,
and to say that something should "never" happen dismisses the
complexity of the situation.  There are times when you might want a
pop-up to go, but most of the time, it's not preferable.  So the
firefox devs thought "hey, what if we have this unobtrusive
notification that lets people override the block, or they can just
click the x and ignore it"

>
> I think I will have to add a ppa or something to get the latest
> firefox .deb package for Hardy 8.04.  I have backports enabled but see
> no new firefox.

the latest version's package is called "firefox-3.5"  but if you can't
find that, try this:

http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/193/installing-firefox-3-5-in-ubuntu-the-easy-way