Most commercial websites these days will serve you pop ups. It's a fact of life that is only fixable with a pop-up stopper (newer mozilla has it built in, as does opera and safari) and some good-old-fashioned ignoring of websites that stoop that low to make $0.10.
The one thing that scares me is that people are so used to this advertising technique they do not stop and question when a website that never served them pop-ups before suddenly spawns gater-ware. Now we're in territory of adware.. What's scummier than serving your users pop-ups? Serving them pop-ups that install "adware" (scumware?) on their PCs and spawn flashing advertisements on any website they visit. At dslr, we get accused of serving pop-ups on regular basis.. which we don't, never have and never will.. Now considering that probably about 1% of people who get them even bother asking, reporting or just plain-old bitching about it .. that probably translates into a healthy percentage of the general internet-surfing population with spyware and adware on their machines. Marvelous.
We're hunting down and prosecuting socially-inept high school kids who happened to have modified an existing virus.. but nobody cares that half the net-users out there are infected with malicious crap spawned by evil advertising companies. So.. it's okay to install software on someone's machine without their consent to make money.. but do it to say "Bill Gates sucks" and you get a jail term. Gotta love it. Capitalism at work.
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I'm wondering how much impact things like Safari and Mozilla will start making on web sites with popups. I honestly have pretty much forgotten they exist. Enough so that I'll send people to a cool site I've found and they'll go 'AUGH. Popup ads all over the place!'.
One of the sites I'm helping out on now is fairly ad driven and we're not supposed to be served popups. But after your post I just realized that being on a Mac these days I am so removed from the whole spyware thing. Just one more thing to worry about I guess. Bleh.
well said.
#I, also, had forgotten they exist. I can't remember the last time I saw a popup ad.
Maybe when I used IE on Windows last year?
#You may consider using Andrew Clover’s anti-parasite script[1]. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t say anything about its efficiency, but it might be worth a try.
[1] http://doxdesk.com/parasite/
#Shot, thanks, but like almost everyone who reads my weblog, I personally don't have that problem.. I was trying to make a point about those that do.
#Same here, I can't remember the last time I've seen a popup ad. I never worry about them anymore.
As more people are switching to different browsers, popups will probably fade out, slowly.
#Not too long ago I set up a PC for a manager where I work and installed Mozilla. I suggested he try using this to browse. The next morning I received an email with 'THANK-YOU' in large font with an explanation of how enjoyable it was to browse without the annoyance.
Since that point, he has upgraded Mozilla himself with each release (including beta releases).
#Maybe even IE will have a popup blocker in the future...nahhhhh
#Maybe I haven’t made myself clear, but Andy’s script works in a way that would at least partially solve your problem – when installed on *your* site, it informs your *visitors* of parasites installed on *their* computers.
You wrote: “The one thing that scares me is that people are so used to this advertising technique they do not stop and question when a website that never served them pop-ups before suddenly spawns gater-ware.” With Andy’s script you can automagically inform them that their computer is full of adware (and that the possible popups are the adware’s doing).
#Ooops, I'm an idiot, thanks for the clarification :)
#Oh man, I am so totally putting that on my site. I occasionally get offhanded comments from people saying things like, "If you hate popups so much, then why do you have so many of them on your website?"
#As someone who had something like 500+ nasty things on the last computer I cleaned off for a friend, I couldn't agree more. The problem is that the people who are affected by this "agree" when they click the 'yes' button to allow the activeX control to run. Personally I'm surprised that no one has tried feeding an XPI if the user-agent is mozilla, but then again, people running mozilla generally know that sites that ask them to install things aren't going to stay on their christmas lists, ya know?
#Hear hear: kasia in a nutshell: Life with pop-ups. The people with the money make the laws. It has always...
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October 1, 2003 03:05 AM