A Popup Is Still A Popup

Remember the good old days of popups on the web? Back in the late nineties before all of the major browsers employed popup blockers, it was common for web site owners to bombard their users with a terrible experience of having to dismiss a popup before being able to use the web site. Geocities was famous for forcing these popups onto its users pages as part of its ill-fated revenue model.

image

Not an uncommon sight back in 1999 (source)

Like everything eventually, popups are back in fashion. This time they’ve manifested as inline DIV tags that bypass popup blockers. Don’t be convinced by the transparent background – having to dismiss a popup before you can browse a site is a still a horrid user experience.

modernpopup

What were they thinking? This one disappears by itself, but not all do this.

I understand sites need to make money from advertising. My worry is that the more obtrusive advertisements become, the more likely users will be pushed to install ad-blockers, and then they wont see any advertisements at all.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s