Internet Explorer to stop pop-ups

[Canis Lupus]

Microsoft plans to add pop-up blocking features to Internet Explorer next year as part of its Service Pack 2 update for Windows XP, a move that would go far toward stamping out the Web advertisements.

Hey, did we hear that right? Let's check again...

Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 (SP2) when it's released in the first half of next year.

Too good to be true for IE users? Maybe it is, coz here's the condition:

But one caveat, he said, is that Microsoft will be gathering customer feedback that will be weighed as part of the final decision to add the feature.

One would contend that Mozilla already has this feature built-in, but with the browser market still favoring Internet Explorer (albiet dwindling, with reports that Mozilla now has 15% of the market), but having it present in the dominant browser means that there would be very mixed reactions from marketers and consumers alike...

But also think of it this way - with IE set to introduce a feature to stop pop-ups, pop-up advertisers would now find other means to promote their product - and there are already advertisments that prove more annoying than pop-ups (like those flash ads that won't leave the screen untuil it's done). With Internet Explorer still set to be the dominant browser for the casual user, marketers would find another way to reach their unwilling audience, maybe as aggresively if not more.

Mozilla users should also be wary of this possibility - the end of pop-up ads would herald a new breed of annoying advertisments, ones that would need also to be addressed by Mozilla in the future.

Check out the full article here (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5105139.html).

[SKYHN]

Im sure MSN and other Microsoft sponsored popups will be 'let through'. Perhaps they are looking to monopolize pop-ups as well.

I use google toolbar and it blocks pop-ups very well. It blocks about 99% of them and if a site uses popups for something you need, you can disable it at the click of the mouse.

[Ocean]

what if there were pop-ups advertizing mozilla?

[Null Actor]

Originally posted by Canis Lupus
Mozilla users should also be wary of this possibility - the end of pop-up ads would herald a new breed of annoying advertisments, ones that would need also to be addressed by Mozilla in the future.

Yeh, but unlike Internet Explorer and MS, we can trust Mozilla to take action against any other intrusive advertising methods used.

[Gunslinger]

Opera

'nuff said

[AOTY2KB]

Only thing bout Google is they collect your surfing habits, something like WMP9 and ur music buying habits.

Do I smell an anti-trust suit? LOL :)

[dbltime]

I have been using Mozilla for about a month and prefer it over Explorer. The pop up killer in Mozilla works great with no tweaking. Highly recommend it.

[Keeter]

I use the Google toolbar, with the option for anonamous usage statistics turned off. It blocks all but the annoying flash ads. I can deal with 1 out of 100 ads, it's not too bad.

[Andrew7689]

Hello

This is my opinion on this subject ok

Well i am not against advert banners and popups, but the thing i am really against is spyware software, that intrudes on your privacy and also messes your operating system up. I think that spyware should be branded as viresware because that is all it is, it is like putting graffitti in your operating system. A lot of people i know agree with this, because you already spend enough time scanning for viruses and defraging the hard disk.

If i play a 3d computer game and the picture keeps stopping and starting you know there is something running in memory that is interffering with the normal operation of your operating system, all i do then is run either spybot, or adaware, and sometimes in a couple of days you could of downloaded about 6 - 18 meg of them and abot 50 - 250 separate spyware programs.

After i have removed them, then i play the game again. The picture and sound are now perfect, all i can say is that it has affected the system.

My friend has windows 98 and he got this spyware program once and it corrupted his operating system, it was very difficult to get rid of as well, the program later turned out it was only designed for windows nt/2000, and if ran on 98 it would serious damage it, but these websites put them automatically on your computer without warning.

I am not nameing any companies here that are offenders, that could cause loads of problems.

Also i hope this advert blocking for internet explorer blocks these type of things as well, them i will agree to it 100 percent. but if it is just going to shut down the separate popup windows i will have to say no, because they don't do any harm, as long as they don't write any programs to your computer. mostly if you go on a website with loads of separate popup windows then all you have to do is click on the main window of the site and hide it behind, plus when i finish with the internet explorer windows i would suggest to do this, i always group same program windows together, so lets say that you have 15 windows of internet explorer up, and 7 of them are the actual websites you want to read, and the other 8 are just adverts, when you have finished reading the sites you wanted to read, just right click on the group at the bottom then close group, and all of them are closed down at once.

Regards

Andrew

[BooRadley]

> One would contend that Mozilla already has this feature built-in, but with the browser market still favoring Internet Explorer

The market favours IE because MSFT leverages it's Windows product to push it. If it were still a competative market, Mozilla/Netscape would be far in the lead.

Microsoft has *always* been behind their competition, even though they've always had the market share. That's why I wished the DoJ would have divested them. They would have been forced to compete to earn the market share, so it wouldn't be Earth shattering news when they impliment a feature Mozilla had a year or two earlier, or when they impliment features that MacOS had a decade or two earlier.

:/

Oh well, that's the way it goes.

[slugo3]

I think andrew7689 hit the nail on the head, spyware is to blame.
I think popup blocking software is useless for the most part because you’re stopping the popups but not addressing the problem, which is almost always spyware these days. I see spyware as "legitimate” viruses. I'm a PC tech and I could remove this crap from just about every computer I sit down at but I usually don’t have the time unless the machine is really bad. I have spent hours on one machine getting it back to a usable state due to the massive spyware infestation. 50 popups at a time brings a 1 gig celeron to its knees.
It’s partly the users fault for installing crap like bonzi buddy and all the toolbars and crap but they don’t know any better. I don’t have a problem with popups from sites that I chose to visit, they have to keep the site going and if it bothers me enough I just don’t visit anymore.

[AOTY2KB]

Yahoo has just added the pop up blocker feature as a free download

[C-Money]

Originally posted by SKYHN
I use google toolbar and it blocks pop-ups very well. It blocks about 99% of them and if a site uses popups for something you need, you can disable it at the click of the mouse.

Ditto, couldn't say that better. :)

[compukeith]

I'm also another faithful google toolbar user. I've personally never had any problems with popups since the google toolbar, except for the flash ones. The flash ones are easy to solve though. I just turned off all the multimedia stuff in IE for the site I was looking at cause the damn ad wouldn't go away. Then, once I was done with the site, re-enabled the multimedia crap.

[compukeith]

Also, IE, a very specifc version of it, already comes with a popup blocker. It's with Longhorn 4051

[dragonasbreath]

a thought on pop-ups. One of my schoolmates turned on a firewall (I think it was), she discovered that the site we had to go to for homework is considered to be popups by her firewall and had to disengage it when she was working on homework.
a permanent pop-up blocker might cause the same problem on some sites - tho it might well be worth the hassel.
And IE is top dog because every computer comes wiht it bundled unless you get Linux/solaris/Mac or one of the others. 95% of computer users don't even know they have an option, let alone how to install one.

[mklangelo]

I really for the life of don't understand why anyone would bother with IE with FireFox out there. It blows IE away hands down.

[MerBleue]

Well i am not against advert banners and popups, but the thing i am really against is spyware software, that intrudes on your privacy and also messes your operating system up. I think that spyware should be branded as viresware because that is all it is, it is like putting graffitti in your operating system.

At the recommendation of a friend, I started using Mozilla over a year ago. Since reinstalling XP (thanks to spyware trashing my PC) with a firewall, I haven't had a problem with those annoying popups nor spyware. Only on the very rare occassion do I open IE, and that's for as short a time as possible. My parents are constantly having myself or a tech fix their PC because of either spyware or viruses (my mum loves popcap games and the like).

http://www.mozilla.org/

[Zakir]

I wore a firefox shirt to my school yesterday and I had a bunch of non-computer users come tell me that it was an awful program (a lot of the others stared at and couldn't figure it out) So, the non-computer users still don't find it as nice as we do.

[redwench]

awful compared to what? it certainly beats ie, even on the first use.

[Zakir]

awful compared to IE........... I certainly agree that it beats IE, but not everybody thinks so.