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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...."
Maybe they'll make that spiffy search assistant start spewing out ad blurbs between file searches. "Hey, have you tried the new Vanilla Pepsi?"
Clippy jokes were funny about six years ago when Office 97 came out.
Life in Orange County
One thing about Microsoft - when handed a bag of lemons, they generally manage to make lemonade.
In this case, you may well have hit the nail right on the head, and shown up the good old 'law of unintended consequences'. It goes like this:
1: Microsoft begins popup blocking, just like Mozilla, Opera, et al.
2: With its 90% market share, advertisers notice, and begin writing ads in sparkle, as you say.
3: Through some odd quirk, purely accidental, of course, pages with sparkle won't work in non-IE browsers. Perhaps by MS insisting that some critical page content be in sparkle, as well as ads.
4: Only MS pages can show ads, and only on IE. No doubt MS will have sparkle guidelines to keep ads from becoming too intrusive. No doubt they'll also sell advertisers on how much more 'effective' the more subtle sparkle ads are, especially when combined with sparkle content on the same page. (Read: IE-only)
5: Ad revenue dries up on non-IE-only web sites, and most non-IE ad-sustained sites wither.
6: Profit!!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What if IE could only block some popups but not others. For example it could block all popups except those that come from MS servers. Maybe it will block all ads except where the advertiser paid MS. IE could automatically download an encrypted list of popups to allow.
War is necrophilia.