I’ve been using Mozilla’s Firefox as my web browser of choice for quite a long time. And I’ve always been pleased by the performance and its options.

That is until recently, when suddenly the damn thing doesn’t block any pop-ups! It almost feels like it encourages them!

Problem is that under “tools” and “options” I have the block pop-up windows checked, however what I’ve found is that every time I reload Firefox the option becomes unchecked.

I check it again, and sure enough on reload it resets back to unchecked. Very strange and very annoying.

I did some digging and it turns out one of my old anti-virus programs – MacAfee – decided to take care of all pop-blocking duties and therefore set Firefox’s responsibilities in this cause to false.

To correct the problem – assuming you no longer run MacAfee – I edited  the code my user.js file, which can be found in your Mozilla Firefox Profile folder (you can do a search if you can’t find it, make sure you check for hidden files), in wordpad changing the line:

user_pref(”dom.disable_open_during_load”, false) to
user_pref(”dom.disable_open_during_load”, true)

Just change the false to true. Save it making sure you don’t save it as user.txt but as user.js. And that should take care of it. You should be now fairly clear of pop-ups.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under Firefox.