Bah! The features of the relatively new
Mozilla sound much more useful in controlling spam and popups than any of the other big names. Consider switching to that, especially since it's controlled by normal USERS, not Yet Another Corporate Big Brother who will not dare to put features into a web browser that would really hinder advertising or consumer 'profiling' (and tick off their buddies in the Other Corporate Big Brother entities...)
But failing that (and I admit that I'm still using IE 5.5 even though Mozilla sounds cool -- it's hard to switch from one major program to another...) I recommend PROXOMITRON to stop popups and lots of other dreck that you don't want interrupting your browsing sessions. It's a completely configurable and FREE local proxy that you can get from numerous locations and it has a dedicated Yahoo group where experts continually talk about the latest tricks used by sleazy website operators to get around filters, and they post updated filters to counter them!
Proxomitron is really a very powerful little program, with a complete pattern matching language that lets you do lots of fancy custom things. Incoming or
outgoing HTML and Java can be inspected and changed 'in transit' to kill snooping or customize the look of every page to your liking. Cookies can be intercepted or modified in transit (in or out!) too. You can spoof your browser ID, your OS, any cookie contents you wish, and lots of other good stuff. You can give it lists of sites to 'turn off' or 'turn on' certain filters with, as well, so it can be completely customized to your own browsing habits. Since so many SE IV Users are more dedicated to modding than playing, I'm sure many of you will also like programming Proxomitron to counter website weenies.
[ October 26, 2002, 03:49: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]