Pop up blocking

Everyone of us has faced those often nasty new browser windows opening up automatically when surfing online at some point or the other. During the early days of the internet, surfing through the web was a peaceful journey. When the internet revolution really began, the marketing guys went online too. And guess what! Pop up adds became their nuke weapon.

According to Wikipedia, "pop up ads or pop ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by Javascript, but can be generated by other means as well".

Thus pop ups maybe a good advertising tools for marketing firms but they can be real irritating and sometimes harmful too. People who have been accustomed to the present form of internet recently, may think why I am creating such a big issue out of pop up adds. Well, I can understand that but the real thing is that you people haven't faced the big time irritation they used to cause when they were shining in full glory. These days pop up adds are not a cause of worry because most browsers these days are very efficient at blocking these pop up adds. But it wasn't so a few years ago. By ''few years ago'', I mean around the year 1999-2000.

At that time, we had no option other than installing 3rd party softwares most popular of which were pop up blocking toolbars sported by several companies. Later on the Yahoo and Google toolbars became widely used and they possessed good pop up blocking capabilities. Opera was the first major browser to include pop up blocking capabilities into their browser software and the others followed suit. These days all browsers have very strong pop up blocking capabilities and thus the pop up menace has slowed down considerably.

Incase you still faced problems by pop up adds, then you might consider upgrading to the latest version of your internet browser. I use Mozilla Firefox as my default browser though I use Opera too when needed and both are good in terms of blocking these pop up adds.
Otherwise you may search out for 'pop up blocker' in a search engine such as www.google.com or www.search.yahoo.com and you will get many free pop up blockers that you can install.

If you are not sure whether you need to upgrade or install a new toolbar/software then you may try this nice little test on the link given below. This site has automatic tests for checking the strength of your browser for blocking pop up adds. My Firefox scored full on their tests :)
Click here for the Pop Up test