yup. the new preview popup made it just so much more annoying :( Maybe there's a greasemonkey script to help with that, but I haven't searched for one yet. I usually stick to flickr nowadays for reference.
Yeah, I used noscript for Firefox for a looong time, and it saved me from tons of grief. Using Chrome at the moment with NotScript installed as well. Sure, you need to activate scripts all the time, but its better then enter the wrong site without protection.
Yeah, getting it too. The annoying thing is that the thumbnails are loading just fine - but then, clicking on them to go through that new annoying preview popup can cause all kind of weird stuff to happen. 99.99% of the time I just want to access the image itself and not the page, so I wish Google could simply safely cache…