Pop-up technology improves

Found on The Inquirer on Sunday, 06 June 2004
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According to news.com, Google's tool bar, which was confidently touted as a firewall against pop-ups has been tunnelled under by the ad companies.

Blocking software usually detects an HTML command known as "openwin" for opening a new window. However, a new breed of pop-ups avoid that command. Some advertisers are sending pop-ups through a "user initiated command" triggered when people "mouse over" an object on the page.

Another technique uses JavaScript commands, and gets around pop-up blockers that don't block user initiated commands like Google and Yahoo.

According to researcher Nielsen NetRatings, pop-ups have only become more prevalent after software appeared to kill them. Their number has increased nearly six times since 2002. A number of big publishers use pop up ads.

Don't the marketing guys understand anything? If people block pop-ups, that doesn't mean they want more of them. What is really helpful here are local proxies with editable rulesets to quickly adapt to the new tricks.