The Metro is a free UK newspaper aimed at commuters (it’s available from train, bus and tube stations). It has a massive daily readership (distributing 886,912 copies every weekday morning, and most people leave it behind for other passengers) and is actually pretty good.

Whilst it comes from the same stable as evil tabloid The Daily Mail, it’s not awful like that rag because it doesn’t usually contain mindless tirades against asylum seekers, single mothers and foreigners.

Its letters page is great. A bit of politics, current affairs and a fair bit of humour. Many people I know who read The Metro read the letters page first (OK, second, after the front page. ner). That’s why it was nice to read this today:

To [people] plagued by pop-up ads on the web – try another browser. For PCs and Macs there is Mozilla (from www.mozilla.org), which allows you to specify different sorts of advert and pop-up to block as well as ‘images’ that don’t come from the same server as the page you’re looking at. There is also Apple’s own browse Safari (www.apple.com/safari), which has pop-up blocking built in as standard. Both these browsers also have other useful features such as tabbed browsing that make Microsoft Internet Explorer look pretty poor by comparison.

But a big “Boooo!” to balanced reporting for also printing this letter:

To stop pop-ups from, well, popping-up download the new Google toolbar for Internet Explorer. I’ve been using it for about two weeks and its been working perfectly (toolbar.google.com).

But still, nice to see Mozilla getting coverage in a the national daily press.