is there any way to block evil floaters?

[gumby]

Visit www.cosco.com. You'll discover there's a pointless turd floating around the screen. Is there any way to block these evil things? In fact they were mentioned today in the Mercury News (here's the article (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14798620.htm)) but like a spammer the alleged "inventor" is unashamed.

I haven't seen these things before, but I don't know if it's because I spend time at more rational sites or because of my ad blocking (if so I'd appreciate a magic regexp for them). But I would love it were they blocked like pop-ups. Or you we could take up a collection and have the company shut down.

There's also a nasty one on www.americanexpress.com if you log in.

[Mad Hatter]

Well, there are a number of flash plugs on the page... but I don't enable flash. Or java/javascript. By default. In fact, I usually just trash the plug-in in Library/Internet plug-ins totally. So that is probably what you see. There are a number of little "flash" boxes on the page.

Try browsing the web with stuff turned OFF by default, then enable only when and where you trust and need that stuff. Solves a lot of problems and is probably safer.

What I still like about FireFox that OW won't do is allow enable/disable of multiple javascript URLs on the same web page (could have amazon, google, doubleclick, image-server, etc along with site-counter and the main web site). Some web sites now don't even display properly UNLESS you have javascript enabled. Is that a way to force/trick users into enabling java so they can add to their counter, display ads better, or because displaying content (text and columns) is "better?"

[Handycam]

You can't disable them en masse, but you could poke around in the source code to find what controls them. In some cases, its an external js file, and you can add a rule to block that server. In the case of the cosco site, the floater (how stupid is that?) is a DIV, so I used CSS:

div#dd { display:none !important }

and it killed the floater thingy.