getting realy pissed off

[gondo]

I don't mind advertising at all. I just don't like the annoyance factor. Who said we wanted popups/unders at all anyways? I don't particularly like them, and have a mouse button hotkeyed to ALT-F4, and can close them before they even load. I don't even like the local TV Cable company. Most of the channels I watch, when commercials hit, they are about 10 times louder than the programs, and blare out, which is not fun at 4am. I wish they had some kind of TV with smart sound or something.

Now the new IE6 in SP2 is pretty decent. The popup blocker does more than just that. It blocks activex and possibly java, then asks if you want to run the script, that should go a long way toward keeping stuff off your system that you don't want.

But the bad thing is you gotta block popups for it to protect you from scripts, as far as I know.

I am playing around with it, to see what has changed, and if there is more settings than the older version. It is probably the same, but they tied in the warnings to the popup blocker bar.

[Smoker]

Internet users' eyes became accustomed to automatically blocking out banner ads years ago,,, a learned response to ignore anything the size of 468x60 for example, especially if it was blinking. Advertisers needed a new way of catching surfers attention and the pop-ups were born... you can't ignore them like a banner ad. The only reason they are still used is because they have such a high click-thru rate compared to normal banner advertising.

I can display 1,000 regular banner ads on my site and earn 3 cents. Or I can display 1,000 pop-up ads and earn 50 cents. I don't use pop-ups because I don't want to annoy my visitors, but there are ways around that too. Some pop-ups are coded to not pop-up until you leave the site and are coming into your next destination. That way the new site seems to be the villain with the pop-up and not the site you just came from.

If they weren't successful they wouldn't be used. If surfers would stop clicking them, and continuing on to purchase whatever is being promoted, advertisers would have to resort to something else.

Most advertisers use agencies and there aren't that many of them. I use an old free version of AdShield that lets you right click on any ad and block that URL from ever appearing in your browser again (unless you change your mind) including Flash ads from Macromedia, Real, etc. (It works similar to a HOSTS file.) You will still see ads on a site ocassionally because some sites keep ad banners on their own servers. But block or add the URLs of the major ad agencies to your Window's Host file and you won't see their garbage again because your browser won't let it in. I've been using text ads on my site long before pop-ups made their first appearance.

As far as hijacking homepages, redirects, etc. You can use the free Script Sentry that will not even wake up and run unless a script is trying to be run and it will tell you about it and ask your permission first. You can also disable ActiveX. You may get a warning that the page won't display properly if you have ActiveX disabled, but who cares? I've never seen a page where that warning mattered unless your trying to download and install something like Flash, use PC Garage, Windows Update, etc., things you don't do very often and you can renable ActiveX at those times.

When ActiveX first came about I was on a site that was demonstsating how evil it is. It said if you click this button I will shut your computer off. I clicked and Windows shut down and powered off in a split second.

If you learn how to use your Hosts file you can block nearly anything from anywhere.

[RayvenX]

Lemme see; I use Firefox, I therefore am not at risk from ActiveX in the first place, I have popup blocking enabled, usually have Javascript disabled and I right click ads when I see them and block them... I settle for a 'no-nonsense' browsing experience.