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August 17, 2006

Google AdSense Prompts Ad Viewers to Download Third Party Applications

When you visit a site with Google AdSense ads, you would hardly expect the ads to trigger an auto-install prompt window to download various third party applications such as Flash, Quicktime and Adobe Acrobat. But that is just what the AdSense javascript was trying to make Internet Explorer users do when they viewed a page with AdSense ads on it.

The problem was with a change made to the show_ads.js file that is downloaded for every AdSense ad unit view. The problem was first reported on August 11th, but it took until August 15th for the problem to be resolved. More details on the specifics of the problem at JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at August 17, 2006 10:32 AM