Pop-ups are back

Slashdot has up a post noting The Return of the Pop-Up Ad.

The general idea is that those who want you to see pop-up ads were losing money due to so many people using pop-up blockers, either as add-on programs, or built into their browsers.
So they figured out a way around that and started programming that for their pop-ups.

As a result, you will likely start seeing more pop-ups.

I first noticed this way back when Google's Toolbar first came out and would block pop-ups (when was that? years ago right?). I was on a site and figuring out a way around something they were doing (I was writing a bot that would post to a discussion board as something fun to do) and in the process discovered that there were ways around the pop-up blocker of Google's Toolbar.
I didn't then, and I won't now go around posting how exactly to get around such things for the obvious reason of - I don't really want pop-up ads.

On the good side, if you use a program like FireFox, then you are likely going to get a patch for this within a week. If you are using IE, I hear version 7 will be out within a year. Safari users (me) will probably be in the monthly security updates that seem to come from Apple.

*Also note that comments will be open on posts starting with this one. See how things go in terms of comment spam.

Posted by Eric at February 21, 2005 01:10 AM | TrackBack