100,000 popups and counting
A grateful Firefox user reported how he accidentally landed on a web page that attempted to load an insane number of popups. Lucky him, none of the apparently infinite popups hurt his PC since he was using Firefox.
I visited the page, and it doesn’t seem that the popup attack was intentional but the result of a nasty bug. Very nasty: I left the page opened in a tab and it’s counting more than 100,000 blocked popups now.
The screenshot below was taken a few minutes before.
Via Digg.
Comments
Percy Cabello
Mike, from the dugg image: http://www.aparthotelmontreal.com/virtualtourphotos.html#404
What is Firefox?
I’ve seen this on a few sites. I think that it is a Javascript function that is recognizing that the popup did not work, and is trying again. Probably a while loop. I doubt that had Firefox allowed popups that 100,000 windows would have opened.
Money Moose
Reminds me of 300.
One browser…
Thousands of ads…
THIS. IS. FIREFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOX!
william austin
yeah i was stumling around with stumble upon my favorite thing in the world when i came across that same page and i’m running linux so i indeed did not experience the events that could of transpired but i just want to say whoever the stumbler that marked that page “i like it ” your a fucking idiot!
Jon
Well, this story is a little misleading, actually.
It doesn’t actually pop up that many popups in any browser. It only needs to load once. But something about the way it was written makes it keep trying until it succeeds, and since Firefox’s popup blocker takes care of it, it just sits there and tries again and again.
Titannick
That’s nice, but really untrue.
consider this piece of pseudo-code.
//open a popup if its not already open
if(!somewariable)
somevariable = new Popup();
If this code is in the mouse handler, or even a timer, it will generate insane amounts of ‘popups’ under firefox.
Really it hasnt blocked that many popups.
It has _blocked that many attempts at_ a popup.
mixand
if you unblock it, it just shows one image but if you show it in internet explorer it shows all of them, firefox knows not to open 100k pop ups :)
Chris Vincent
Damn… those number of popups would have knocked out your computer for sure…
tickleme
Pop ups are stopped unless you have mcaffee security center. This rewrites your user.js file. When you remark out the mcaffee entry in user.js, all is well until Mcaffee rewrites the user.js.
Andrew
Let’s hear it for Firefox !
Must send a link to my friends who continue to use IE. Not the offending site (I wouldn’t do that) but this site!
LOL
Did anyone notice that on the top of the page it says unit 404? XD I just found that kinda funny.
Izkata
It appears to have been fixed now. Not a single attempt at a popup.
Mike
What site was this? I wanna try!
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