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

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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. :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2007
    There is an option (in IE7 anyways) to turn the sound off for a popup notification.

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    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?

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    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.

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    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.

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    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.

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2007
    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?)

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed