Brave Shields ignores popup settings - causing popup ad windows

Description of the issue:

Brave Shields is used to block ads, trackers, etc. When opening a website which such trackers or ads if Shields are up with appropriate settings. However, I observed that after visiting a website with a video player with those annoying invisible clickable elements that prompts a pop-up (opens a new, smaller Brave window). The popup shows up with the default Brave Shields message which says X website has been blocked by Brave Shields due to settings, proceed or go back. My settings, by default, are set to block popups. Popups show up due to Brave Shields.

Put shortly, Brave Shields put users at risk by showing a pop-up window when, by default behavior, the pop-up would not show up when settings are set to block pop-up windows. Even though, the website contents are not loaded, it can be very annoying to constantly close the pop-up.

The website I visited would constantly open a pop-up when I clicked on the video player.
How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Enable Brave Shields with Aggressively block ads and trackers, block fingerprinting, and block third-party cookies.

  2. Make sure pop-ups are disabled by default or disabled for the website you will visit in Step 3 in your Brave Settings.

  3. Go to a website that contains popups.

  4. Trigger the popup (for the website I did, it was prompted by a click).

  5. Observe a popup window appears with the Brave Shields built-in template “X is blocked due to your Brave Shields setting." (verbatim).

Expected result: No popup window shows up.

Brave Version( check About Brave):
Brave 1.86.146 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 144.0.7559.110

Additional Information: Mitigation is to click on the “Don’t warn me about this site again” and press “Go back”.
After doing this mitigation, no popup appears, but this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

For clarity, the exact Brave Shields message I receive is below:

The popup settings in Brave is a carry over from Chromium, its very basic. Not used for ads script, the popup settings in used for sites that launch legitimate popups mostly.

Is there a site with ad popups you’re getting?

Right. The expected behavior also would be a notification (or in the upper panel of the omnibox) indicating that popups are blocked; which of course means that no popup window shows up. Instead, a popup from Brave shows up. I got it to finally reappear, this is the exact message I’m talking about:

Which website did that popup come from?