Stop Google "Sign-in" Pop-ups
Since pretty much the beginning of the internet, pop-ups were deemed a significant annoyance, so much so it diminished and ruined the users’ browsing experience and significantly reduced efficiencies. Hence the addition of pop-up blocking settings to all browsers long ago.
However, for some unknown reason Firefox gives Google a free pass and allows their “sign-in” pop-up that pop-ups seemingly on every website you visit where you then have to then manually close the pop-up on pretty much every single website you visit - even though you have the pop-up blocker setting on ( and the only way to turn off a pop-up blocker is to specifically add a website to allow for pop-ups).
This is absolutely horrible and not acceptable. If you have the pop-up setting on, no pop-up should be allowed to get through no matter what it is or the source. If you allow one pop-up to continue then you should be allowing hundreds of thousands of other pop-ups as well. But you wouldn’t as you know this would be unacceptable, but again, somehow Firefox allows Google’s pop-up to go through and it pop-ups on pretty much every single website you visit.
Note that I selected Privacy and Security Setting as the "topic" above as that is were Firefox has it's pop-up setting (and where you can add exceptions to allow pop-ups for specific websites)
All Replies (4)
Install uBlock Origin and add the following line to the "My filters" tab:
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
Thanks for the response, however this does not solve the problem: 1) This is a third-party add-on that is requesting access to all data. For security/privacy this is never acceptable. 2) Even if there are people who are completely comfortable downloading random 3rd party add-ons to their browser (and which requires full access to everything), only certain individuals "in-the-know" know about this add-on and the very specific script you also included above that is also required within the My Filters tab (||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p), so this does not help anyone else with the pop-up issue who are not "in-the-know". Simply put, this is a Firefox issue. Period. And should be dealt with there and not with some random 3rd-party add-on and some random script that is required on top that that no one (no average person) is going to know about. 3) At the end of the day this is really simple. The Google pop-up is a pop-up which should NOT be getting through Firefox. Is Firefox receiving kick-backs, or a significant revenue stream from Google to allow their specific pop-up to go through? As no one else's' pop-ups are getting through. If so, pretty shady.
Firefox is choosing to not deal with this issue and allowing (or getting paid by Google) for it to take place in the first place and to continue within their product.
Firefox popup blocker has never blocked all popups for me. There have always been confirmation boxes and other prompts (such as cookie consent boxes, purchase transaction 2FA code input dialogues etc.) that are shown.
This link explains that Firefox can not / will not block some popups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pop-blocker-settings-exceptions-troubleshooting
So perhaps the more likely explanation is that the Google prompts do not meet the technical criteria for blocking (similar to the login box that you would actually want to see when you are trying to sign in to that page).
Rather than it being the case that Firefox itself is treating them uniquely in comparison with how it would treat other website prompts that are technically equivalent?
Traditional popups are new tabs or windows that appear outside the page. Overlays inside the page like cookie consent banners or the Google login prompt need to be blocked by a different method.
Strict Tracking Protection can block it by going to about:config and creating urlclassifier.features.socialtracking.blacklistHosts (String) with value "accounts.google.com" but this may break Google login more generally.