Wow, that was rude

[jducoeur]

So I just went to a page on about.com (found via Google to answer a question in someone else's LJ). When I closed the window, I found myself confronted by a full-screen popup advertisement for Ford.

Okay, I know they're desperate to get you to notice their advertisements. But jeez -- that comes very close to my "I'm boycotting you for annoying advertising practices" line...

Comments

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Since I'm stuck on IE, I use the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/) and it does a good job of blocking those pop-ups. The ones that piss me off are the floating animations that don't immediately show an "X" to close them, forcing you to really look at them and waste valuable eyeball seconds scanning a page.

Pop-up blocker...

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

At Fandango today, I found myself repeatedly confronted by pop-ups, and felt much as you did. Bleah.

(We can't use the google toolbar at work, as it's got some security risks and our guys haven't finished analyzing it. So....)

[baron-elric.livejournal.com]

If you can use it, I've found Opera to be quite good at stopping pop-up ads. The version I'm running has trouble running some functions when I want them to run, probably because I've set my security too high for them. For such cases, I'll fire up IE, but I like the reduced ad load on Opera.

The full-screen ad is clearly over the top. I've been bothered by a few that I've seen that appear, move around, and then drift off the screen without ever offering a way to close them. Ah, this brave new world we live in...

[cellio]

Full-screen and moving ads are really annoying. Mozilla has a preference to turn off unrequested pop-ups, which works pretty well. That means you don't get any of the indirect ads, but pop-ups that you probably want, like the traffic-cam or the poll results or whatever, still work. Eventually, I presume the ad-generators will find ways to lie to your browser about whether you clicked a link, but for now browsing is mostly good with this option.

[(Anonymous)]

I've decided Mozilla Firebird is the current front-runner in the new improved browser race, having recently displaced Galeon.
No popups. Ad blocking per server. Easy-to-write extensions with zillions of hooks. Solid HTML renderer (Gecko). Extreme tab-based browsing.

-dsr-