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Several people have reported getting popups in Firefox lately, and I ran across a solution on the MozillaZine discussion forums. My apologies if this has been posted previously. I looked, but didn't see it.
One possible cause is apparently related to an old bug dealing with how popups are blocked when called from within plugins. It's turned into an exploit in which those wishing to force a popup past the popup blocker open a brief flash screen with no content other than the code for the popup.
This can be disabled by placing the following line into your user.js file:
user_pref("privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins",2);
The "2" integer allows websites you allow to send popups to still send them. (Some sites with certain kinds of content require it to function properly.) You can change this number to "3" and block all popups sent via this method. Setting it to "0" allows all popups through if for some weird reason you want to do that.
Alternately, you can do this via the about:config window. You'll have to right-click and "add new integer" since this preference is not already in there. I find this method cumbersome, but whatever suits you.
I tested this on a site mentioned in the thread where I found this, and it did block the popup that was getting through before.
FWIW, another cause of the recent increase of popups that Firefox and Mozilla users are getting involves certain extension. Some of this change the way FF deals with popups, and a few do it badly. If you're having this problem and the above suggestion doesn't solve it, you might check your extensions as well.
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