Finally! Firefox is working with a new patch that will make short work of those annoying Flash based pop-up ads we have all come to loathe. It is my hope that this will provide us with some relief for a little longer than the original blocker.

The Mozilla Foundation is testing a patch to its Firefox browser that puts the kibosh on popup ads which have been slipping through the open-source browser’s blocker.

In recent weeks, said the group, advertising networks, in particular Fastclick, have started exploiting the fact that Firefox’s popup blocker doesn’t stymie Flash and Java popups by default.

Firefox can disable such popups, but the current version has that feature turned off due to concerns that it would interfere with legitimate popup windows that some sites use. A manual method of changing the default to block plug-in popups was offered up by the foundation several weeks ago, but now it’s testing an add-on patch that automates the chore. [Read the rest]