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POPUP ADS PRESENT INTERNET USERS WITH NEW PROBLEMS
By Benjamin Allen
January 28, 2003
Over the last five years, advertisers have been developing technology
that takes complete control of our web browsers. The web user's experience
has become increasingly cluttered with popup ads.
These ads come in many varieties: ads that flash bright colors to
draw attention and distract, ads that pretend to be operating system
alerts, ads masquerading as a virus, floating ads that popup
in the middle of the screen and don't close for 30 seconds, pop-under ads,
pop-over ads, and ads that redirect to pages that launch even more ads. Anyone
who has browsed
the web in the last few years has
experienced this problem, and knows how painful and time consuming
closing these rogue windows can be.
Big business is finally taking notice. America Online,
which relies on popup ads as a significant source of revenue, finally
admitted that popup windows are a nuisance to its users. With the release
of the latest version of their software AOL 8.0, they have made a corporate
decision to limit the amount of advertisements that appear onscreen (this
link requires a free nytimes.com registration).
What can we do about excessive popup ads?
To eliminate these ads, popup blocking technology has become
more prevalent. Today, scores of applications employ this technology.
Earthlink, the popular
dialup and broadband ISP, has developed a
Popup
Blocker Tool to appeal to their customers. Web browsers such as
Mozilla, Safari and Omniweb have
popup blocking features. Computer users
are installing personal firewalls like Zone
Alarm, Watchguard,
and ATGuard,
(now
incorporated into Norton
Internet Security) to block popup ads. In
addition, many standalone popup blockers are on the market; popular
ones include: AdsGone, Popup
Killer, Web Washer, Internet
Junkbuster, Guidescope, Pop-Up
Stopper, Popup
Buster,
StopZilla, Pop-Up
Zapper, PopSubtract, Popup
Ad Filter,
and the
Proxomitrom html
filter.
While popup blocking technology does eliminate many of these annoying
popup ads, this "fix" has created a new problem: web sites that
incorporate popup windows within their intended functionality may no
longer work. Not all popup windows are bad: help and tutorial
windows are frequently accessed in this manner. Web developers may
now need to take a few more steps to make sure that their information
is displayed correctly.
How do popup blockers work?
Web browsers that embed popup blocking technology into their
application simply hard-code the application to prevent javascript
from launching a new window, under a defined set of circumstances. Within
the preferences of these web browsers, popup windows can be turned on and
off. Some are more robust by blocking popups from specific URLs.
Most firewalls and standalone popup blockers act as a proxy between
the web browser and the internet. The blocker intercepts the html and
javascript. Calls that would normally launch a new window are
removed, or replaced with substitute code before they reach the web
browser.
These blocking techniques work with varying degrees of success.
None of them are 100% effective. When blockers miss the odd
popup, they usually allow the user to add the offending URL to a list of
those that are "always
blocked". As creators of popup ads continue to develop new tricks, popup
blocking technology also continues to evolve.
What about popups that aren't javascript or html based?
Microsoft, in all its
wisdom, has its Messenger
Service enabled in default installations
of their operating systems. This allows anyone to send popup messages to
the OS itself,
rather than just the client's web browser. The original purpose of this feature
was to allow administrators to message
clients on the network regarding network outages, downtime, and other alerts.
Unfortunately
advertisers
have hijacked this feature and are spamming the
world on NetBIOS ports.
Windows users don't even need to launch a web browser in order to
receive
annoying popups on their screen.
>> Find out
how to block Messenger popups
What about popups that aren't advertisements?
Web developers employ popup windows for a number of legitimate
purposes; it's their misuse that has caused these problems. In order to ensure
that
a "legitimate" popup has been
launched on the user's machine, Code
Mechanic has prepared a toolkit for
the web developer: some javascript code to test whether a popup window has successfully
opened or not.
The Popup Window Test provided here is
unfortunately
more robust than most
of the popular popup blockers: it bypasses
many of them outright. Attempts to bring this to the attention of these software developers
have been unsuccessful, but generated some interesting automated customer service
responses.
Feedback on this article and the use of this code is welcomed: send comments
to: ben@earcom.com.
>> Launch the Popup Window Test
>> Download a .zip archive of the Popup Blocking Toolkit
Relevant links:
• Are
Popup Advertisements on the Web Illegal?
• Popup
Ads Begin To Face Serious Opposition
• No
Popup Blocking in Netscape 7.0
• Fighting Back Against Messenger Popup SPAM
•
Beating Messenger Spam
-> go to news index
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