Better handling of pop-ups

[bbinto]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2VVS3QHD9KIE9/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B078B5YMPD

Terrible on the firestick pop ups everywhere. Nothing at all like the PC version

Another review:
Pop-ups locking you out and force a restart
It's currently pretty useless because of the limited functionality with lots of bugs too such as pop-ups that lock you out and force you to restart. I love Firefox so I'm hoping Mozilla rolls out updates asap and this gets developed into a full browser.

Another review:
https://www.amazon.de/review/R3V1WG0JC0H49Y/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B078B5YMPD

[mcomella]

Sites this affects (will be updated):

• radio.de (radio.de doesn't work (pop up issues) #262)
• Default tiles
  • imdb (click a link and be prompted to open in app, banner at bottom; banner hidden in focus, pop-up is not)
  • metacritic (pop-up ad; not present in focus)
  • The Hollywood Reporter (pop-up ad; not present in focus)

Information from a Wikipedia dive:

• The style of ads we're trying to block are "hover ads" (edit: actually pop-ups may be problems too)
• "...but it can be blocked with third-party ad blockers such as AdBlock and Adblock Plus, or by using custom style sheets." (via link)
• Adblock Plus is open source and the main repo is available under GPLv3 – maybe we could look into sharing that (I think it's compatible with MPLv2)

[mcomella]

• Adblock and ublock are also GPLv3, unclear if ublock also blocks hover ads
• ublock seems to block all 3rd party frames in advanced user configurations: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode It blocks 3rd party scripts too, which can help. Unclear what lower levels do

[mcomella]

Some solutions:

• Use tracking protection (blocks 3rd party scripts, which might block some ads); edit: testing focus above, it seems to improve my small sample of websites – we should revisit this issue after TP lands
• With GeckoView, allow add-ons like ABP/ublock
• Learn from existing solutions, e.g. in existing ad blockers (license pending), to share code/implement our own
• Write our own implementation that heuristically determines hover ads and removes them (this sounds out of scope for this week)
• Rather than trying to remove them, maybe we could give the user a quick way to close them (e.g. heuristically find the close button, replace pointer with spatial navigation to more easily close) – this could also get us information on pop-ups that we could use to create a blocklist

[mcomella]

Actually, pop-ups may be a problem too – they're usually not a problem in focus but occasionally a website will redirect the main window to a pop-up – maybe users are seeing this too.

[mcomella]

triage: we decided to fix this with tracking protection for 1.1 but we moved this to 2.0 for further work.

[mcomella]

is available under GPLv3 – maybe we could look into sharing that

Apparently using GPL code forces our whole app to be GPL so it looks like that's not an option.

[athomasmoz]

Closing. Will continue tracking market problem