Cheesy Quintessence

You’ve likely stumbled upon the successor of pop-up advertisements: DHTML pop-ups. These advertisements utilize JavaScript to change the CSS positioning of a block element containing an ad. A pop-up blocker will not stop them because they don’t create windows; all of the event takes place in the web page itself. Additionally, the “close” buttons on some of these elements have a secondary function of opening a pop-up window, which will get past many pop-up blockers because the browser will interpret it as a requested window!

Why don’t advertisers seem to understand that people will not tolerate this crap? It’s really unfortunate that JavaScript is going to be abused in this way… because I’m to the point of turning it off almost all of the time. Browsing without JavaScript is much faster due to excessive use of it, as well. Perhaps the advent of such JavaScript abuse will change the approach Google has been taking with its more recent projects, such as Gmail and Google Maps, both of which absolutely require JavaScript.

But since there are a few sites out there that still demand JavaScript, I think it’s time that browsers take an accessible and intuitive approach to JavaScript permissions. My ideas…

1. Incorporate a JavaScript whitelist or blacklist, at user’s choice; much like Firefox’s pop-up, image, and extension installer lists.
2. Add handy buttons to add or remove the currently viewed server from the whitelist or blacklist.
3. Add an option to refuse JavaScript from off-page servers.
4. Add a quick, per page option for JavaScript permissions; much like Opera’s image loading options.
5. Add numerous JavaScript options pertaining to the manipulation of CSS. Extra points if your whitelist/blacklist can individually change each server’s permission to each of these.