It’s quite common these days for web browsers to feature native content blockers that disable annoying ads and trackers. Native popups in browsers aren’t really as popular as they used to be but countless websites still use in-page popups for promotions and email lists. It appears that Mozilla wants to do away with them as well by adding an in-page popup blocker to its Firefox browser.
Mozilla is still in the process of planning out this feature and it’s surveying users for examples of annoying in-page popups. The company wants to ensure the Firefox is capable of automatically detecting and blocking these popups instead of having to rely on a predefined blacklist that needs to be updated constantly.
It has launched a survey to ask users to point out websites that use such in-page popups for things like surveys, newsletter signups, etc. The idea here is to obviously detect which in-page popups are actually helpful and which aren’t.
It’s certainly not going to be easy for the browser to do that on the fly without having a blacklist to go on. However, since this is still in the very early stage, it’s going to be a while before we hear more from Mozilla about the feature.
Are you tired of seeing in-page popups like this? We're experimenting with a popup blocker to dismiss them automatically, and we're curating a dataset for it. If you know of a site that shows these kinds of popups, help us by submitting it here: https://t.co/IGcuMT2INt pic.twitter.com/qmdUAjhFWe
— Ehsan Akhgari (@ehsanakhgari) March 9, 2018