Recently i spent quite some time pouring over a website's javascript. It wasn't neccessarily because it was being exceptionally clever or because i wanted to duplicate it. To be honest, it was for quite the opposite reason, really. It was because it generated a popup.
Yep, some horribly clever marketing sod had determined that in spite of the continual loathing that is expressed toward popups, the companies that use them and the products they feature, they figured out a way to bypass Firefox's built in popup blocking and brought up an unbidden window regardless.
Venkman wasn't really much help since it crashed my browser and generally took several real clock seconds to execute each instruction, but it did provide me enough of a clue as to what was going on.
The hack they used was rather miserable. They had an iframe load on a 3 second delay that then sent a parent request which triggered the window open. Since the parent page had fully rendered, it didn't block the new window request.
Fortunately, it's fairly easy to block the originating host (*cough*falkag.net*cough*) using AdBlock, but i do expect more idiots to try and do this sort of end-run. Friggin' wonderful.
I still use the Proxomitron for all of my web browsing at home. Unfortunately the author died and never left the code to anybody, but the executable for Windows can still be found out there and it comes with a nifty set of pre-built filters for the majority of the offending types, including ad-banner replacement and the like.
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Just when you think you have them beat…