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Tony Schreiner's WebLog

Developer - IE | Vista. Fighting complexity for 9 years and counting.

Syndication

*Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist!

One thing that amused me as I mindlessly surfed the web while stuck in my parents house due to the snowstorm in Colorado was the number of sites that still attempt to show pop-up advertisements -- sites like cnn.com and weather.com, not just shady sites. I'm left wondering... did they not get the memo that not only are pop-ups annoying, but also every web browser released in the past several years blocks them (longer if you count extensions, since IE6 didn't until XP SP2 (which everybody should have by now)).

I'm probably weird in that I keep the speakers on my PC on mute most of the time, both at home and work, but I had forgotten to mute the one on my laptop. *Bloop*...*Bloop*...*Bloop*.

Happy new year. :-)

Published Monday, January 01, 2007 3:58 PM by tonyschr

Comments

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Monday, January 01, 2007 10:12 PM

There is an option (in IE7 anyways) to turn the sound off for a popup notification.

Doug

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Tuesday, January 02, 2007 5:17 PM

What amazes me is that even IE7 doesn't catch them all.

Couldn't we just disable the javascript for openning new windows except on trusted sites?

kfarmer

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Tuesday, January 02, 2007 8:48 PM

We do disable the javascript for opening new windows.  If you still get pop-ups, it is most likely caused by an insecure Active X control that has been installed.  Try disabling various things in Tools->Manage Add-ons and see if the pop-ups go away.  Also upgrade to the latest versions of your controls.

jeffdav

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Wednesday, January 03, 2007 12:19 AM

Another way I've seen sites work-around pop-ups involve *forcing* you to perform a user-initiated action in order to interact with the site.

For example, I've seen some sites refuse to scroll until you click in a certain spot, at which point they show the pop-up window in response to the click.

Fortunately only the really shady/stupid sites seem to do that, and I only encounter them when clicking random links from digg.com, fark.com, and similar aggregation sites.

tonyschr

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Wednesday, January 03, 2007 12:22 AM

Doug, but that takes all the fun out of it. :-)

I've developed a habit of avoiding sites that *try* to show pop-up windows, even though IE blocks them. IMHO if a web site doesn't respect its visitors, it doesn't deserve to get visited.

Unfortunately weather-related sites seem to be the worst offenders, so if you know of any good ones (other than http://www.noaa.gov/), please send them my way.

tonyschr

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Sunday, January 14, 2007 2:00 PM

Seeing you are a software engineer on IE7, just thought you'd like to know that there is a Firefox add-on that KILLS IE7.  It's called ieTab and it loads the IE engine into Firefox.  Just click a button, and in FF, you got IE.  Very nice..

EXCEPT - with this add-on in FF, Internet Explorer will not show.  I say show the GUI because it does load into Processes. (Maybe just the engine?)

ChillerBaggins

# re: *Bloop!* - Wow, pop-up ads still exist! @ Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:42 PM

ChillerBaggins, the add-on you mention is leveraging part of our platform, which is the ability to host the HTML rendering engine in any application.

One of the best things about IE was that it designed using a component-based architecture so that it can easily be reused in this way. Other browsers such as Maxthon also leverage our HTML rendering engine.

Regarding Firefox, I believe the Gecko engine is also reusable, so if someone desired they could build an add-on for IE which hosts the Fx rendering engine in a tab. :)

tonyschr

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