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IE To Block Pop-Ups
smd4985 writes "Next year MS will release a XP service pack that enables IE to block pop-up ads. Only a few years late. Maybe Mozilla.org/Opera should patent the technology to make it hard for Bill 'embrace and extend' Gates to kill those XCam ads...."
99% of off the shelf shopping cart systems now rely on this behaviour. This will surely alienate even more corporate customers, where the hell are Microsoft going?
What's the point? Among others, Proxomitron is free, takes 5 minutes to set up, and is massively configurable for popup/banner/script/etc. blocking.
The strange thing here for me is why Microsoft would do this from a business perspective. I would think they're drawing a fair amount of income from their MSN portal advertising. Maybe it doesn't work for MSN? Or they're only blocking popups because the don't plan on having them on a MSN linked site anyway?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Or they'll just exploit one of IE's 40 billion security holes to get the pop-ups through and everyone else will be just fine.
Soon pop-up ad companies will be hiring lawyers to attack Microsoft for blocking ads...
Who do we cheer for then? (grin)
Davak
My memory is no doubt shorter than it should be (probably da weed) but I don't remember Microsoft EVER having a go at someone over a patent issue. As far as I know they use patents only defensively. I would be genuinely interested if anyone could come up with a counterexample. Anyone?
So now they just lack tabbed browsing, type ahead/fast search, better text zooming on fixed-size text, real PNG support and the rest of the "to-do list".
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Will work for bandwidth.
Or have a preference, like Mozilla for sites allowed to send popups. There are few sites where I'm prepared to put up with popups, and only if I feel that I really want to buy something. The "allow requested popups" feature in Opera is not that useful to me, since 99% of sites don't warn you that's what they're going to do, so you have no way of distinguishing between a popup that has been requested or otherwise.
I subscribe to MS technet, which contains a shitload of content, indexed on a CD. The interface used to navigate the index is nothing more than a front for IE (all of the index content is pretty standard HTML stuff). One thing I just noticed the other day is that if I open more than one item, it opens them a tabbed interface. Perhaps this is a special function of the interface, but like I said, it really isn't anything more than a framework for IE, so if they can do it there, why not in mainstream IE? Hell, for all I know, us technet subscribers are beta testing the tabs!
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
You know, where the phone companies sell their (home) customers services to block telemarketers, and then turn around and sell the telemarketers methods on how to get around those blocks?
Perhaps Microsoft will sell Pop-up advertisers a way to get around the new IE pop-up blocking software.
Hey, it's just another revenue stream!!
here are a number of free utilities to block popups in IE that work well, but AFAIK, none can block Flash animations
Then use Mozilla Phoenix. And download the "click to play flash" extension.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I think this happens when the page hasn't finished loading and you click the link. Moz seems to just stop new windows being opened whilst the page is being loaded, but once it has completed loading, then new windows are A-Okay.
..which is maybe not the best implementation, but I still like Moz.
While normally I like when IE catches up feature-wise to the rest of the world, this time I'm concerned.
For example, if IE decided to implement CSS1 (like they advertised that IE6 supported), people could develop web sites that used more CSS, and life would be good for developers and users.
However, if IE blocks pop-ups, now advertisers get no bang for their buck with the pop-up medium. So they move to Flash ads that take up half the screen and then roll up out of the way after they're done (see ads on ZDNet). If that's blocked, something else will be used. It's an arms race--if you make a better missile defense system, they'll just make a better missile. Obnoxious ads are with us forever.
Even though IE is years behind the rest of the web browsing world on all fronts, this does remove a lot of the advantage of "alternative" browsers. Pop-up blocking will soon be an irrelevant feature, because no web sites will have pop-ups. This hurts Mozilla worse than it hurts IE.
You mean those of us who see that XP is to 2k as ME is to 98, bloated and buggy?
We use Mozilla/Netscape, and not only get pop-ups blocked, but spyware as well.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
With the delay in longhorn, why can't microsoft just wait to announce features till they are actually close? Say 3 months ahead of the release?
I'm so sick of hearing about new MS features for this or that only to find that they won't be available till 2006.
If sites begin to use these features more, people with have to upgrade and when they upgrade, there is of course the danger that they move away from IE.
Microsoft is quite happy with the status quo and will do anything to defend it.