Member Avatar for Thomasio

I know C++, PHP and a few more, but I do not have the slightest clue, how to make a browser extension and the tutorials I find on the web are like chinese to me, so let me ask here, if anyone can help me out.

Task: I want to auto-close advertising popups and popunders without blocking them completely.
The biggest problem is, most websites detect ad blockers and ask you to disable them before they show their site.
Also some popunders have to redirect back to the site they came from, or else it won't execute a click on the site.
Therefore popups and popunders have to be allowed to open and then get closed as if the user had clicked the close button on the tab.

A chrome extension that almost does what I want would be "Ad Close Gold", but that one has limitations I cannot live with.
For one, it doesn't have an option to delay an auto close, meaning when it closes popunders, it also closes the site that came from.
For two it has a rather small max amount of entries, due to storage limitations in Chrome.

So the question would be, is there an open source extension one could use and modify and if not, how to make such an extension from scratch?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rproffitt
Member Avatar for rproffitt

This should be a few year investment of time so let's be sure you know what this effort will cost you. Moving on I am using Ghostery and Ublock Origin which as you suspect is detected by some sites. For those sites I just go elsewhere. This is their loss, not mine.

Since ad's are a prime malware vector, my choice is to keep on blocking and not turn it off.

Member Avatar for Thomasio

I'm sure the developper of Ad Close Gold hasn't spent years on developping it.
Unfortunately that's not open source, or else a few small edits would do the trick already.
I've tried contacting them, but they do not reply.

Edited by Thomasio
Member Avatar for rproffitt

As a developer of other apps you do hear "this should take long" once in a while. You smile and see where your client is going with this. Usually it's about the cost of the project.

But hey, https://github.com/mukunku/Ad-Close-Gold is there and if you feel a small edit will fix it, go for it.

Edited by rproffitt because: Spelling error correction.
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