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The Death of Popups?

Popups provide us with righteous indignation. And the problem with things that give us righteous indignation is that we overreact. We use napalm on a housefly.

Don’t like spam? How about an email filter that will stop some spam, but will also prevent you from receiving the email newsletters you subscribe to, emails from prospects looking to give you business, and emails from your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend from college who’s in town for the weekend and wants to see you?

Popup blockers work the same way. Yes, it’s nice to know that we’re being protected from the one millionth ad for Orbitz/Travelocity/Expedia/Netflix, or the one billionth ad for an X-10 spy camera. However, some Web developers use popups for completely legitimate purposes. Sometimes it’s for navigational purposes, or it’s a design choice, or it’s a good programming solution, or even it’s promotional, such as a giveaway of steak knives for joining our mailing list.

We recently found out that we were being blocked. We use a popup to create a printer-friendly, dynamically-created affiliation letter that hospitals need to get from one of our clients’ sites. Turns out that a number of people weren’t able to see the popup because they had their popup blockers on by default. AOL users didn’t even get a warning! It just looked like our programming was shoddy.

A better solution, which I believe Safari (the Mac-only browser) offers, is to allow you to block all popups, or just popups from a 3rd party (not from the site itself.) That’s more likely to catch X-10 ads but allow site-centric popups to continue.

However, I can’t convince the whole world to switch. Instead, I’ll need to make sure that going forward we find alternative solutions to the popup. (And for those of you wondering about having a link open in a new window, those days are probably numbered as well.)

Rich Brooks
No Longer Making Popups

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  • http://www.timflight.com Tim Flight

    The popup blockers in Safari and Firefox work in a similar way. If set to block popups are allowed if you explicitly click on a link which is designed to open in a new window or popup. Random popups that you didn't specifically ask for are blocked.

    Firefox goes a little further with the customization allowed. Firefox will allow you to block popups, but create a white-list of sites to allow. Therefore sites that use popups for legitimate purposes can be added to your white-list… Sites that you pick. Safari doesn't have that option.

    I'm not familiar with an option in Safari to block popups from third parties only. I know you can do that with Cookies, but I don't see the option to do that with popups.

    I really like how Safari's Status Bar (you can turn on and off in the 'View' menu) tells you if the link your cursor is hovering over will open in a new window.

  • http://www.timflight.com Tim Flight

    The popup blockers in Safari and Firefox work in a similar way. If set to block popups are allowed if you explicitly click on a link which is designed to open in a new window or popup. Random popups that you didn't specifically ask for are blocked.

    Firefox goes a little further with the customization allowed. Firefox will allow you to block popups, but create a white-list of sites to allow. Therefore sites that use popups for legitimate purposes can be added to your white-list… Sites that you pick. Safari doesn't have that option.

    I'm not familiar with an option in Safari to block popups from third parties only. I know you can do that with Cookies, but I don't see the option to do that with popups.

    I really like how Safari's Status Bar (you can turn on and off in the 'View' menu) tells you if the link your cursor is hovering over will open in a new window.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 9:10 am and is filed under Web Design & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.