Popups: Enough Already! <Rant>

Warning: the external links referenced in this article will most likely generate popups - do not click on them unless you are one of these fabled people who actually like popups, or if you have a popup blocker in your browser.

Whilst Googling around today, I chanced upon an (old) news article on The Times of India.

Luckily, I am running Mozilla Firefox, which has a built-in popup blocker.

According to my browser, "Firefox prevented this site from opening 7 popup windows". That's right, SEVEN popups. Clicking on "Options" shows 7 URL's off of 4 unique domains.

This is the sort of bullshit that makes the 'Net suck. Obviously, enough people made enough noise for Microsoft to finally integrate a popup blocker in version 7 of Internet Exploiter, long after Opera and Mozilla implemented it in their browsers.

I understand that most sites (especially those that have no corresponding offline presence) need to make revenue and I have no problem with small file-size banner ads in principle. If I am interested in a banner, I'll click on it, rest assured. I will never *EVER* buy or subscribe to anything displayed in a popup.

The same idiocy is practiced by the tuckfards at experts-exchange.com. They evade popup blockers by deliberately obfuscating the JScript to launch a popup, even fooling Firefox:


<script language=javascript><!--
document.write('<scr'+'ipt language=javascript src="http://a.tribalfusion.com/j.ad?site=*removed*
&adSpace=*removed*&size=468x60&type=horiz&noAd=1&requestID=*removed*">
</scr'+'ipt>');
//-->
</script>

[note the obligatory misnomer domain name, indicative of most dotcom-only junk-monger companies these days]

Particularly ironic - given that experts-exchange is a tech resource site, they should already be enclued into how annoying popups really are.

So, webmasters, get a clue: no-one likes popups, so lose them already!