I come from using Galeon which is sadly unsupported now. When you'd click a link it would open it, pop-up or not. Sure there were a few that got by but a surprisingly low amount. With Firefox you click and get a a dialog, click on icon to select the site. That's a lot of extra clicking to me.
As for the times it doesn't work it's on sites like MLB.com or other big sites. I can't figure out the reason for the behavior either.
I miss Galeon