Popups attacked mercilessly

I was viewing the Guinness World Records website. After browsing it in Firefox awhile, I decided to analyze it from the perspective of a different browser.

I saw the Internet Explorer information bar appear notifying me that a popup had been blocked. OK, fine. I clicked it and chose for popups to be allowed temporarily. Then what appeared was a notification from the Google toolbar that a popup had been blocked. OK, so IE was blocking Google’s popup. I set the Google toolbar to allow popups, too.

Now I got a little notification in the lower right corner telling me that a popup had been blocked. Refreshed. Same deal, a popup had been blocked by something in the lower-right corner (where the program icons lay by the time). OK, fine, what’s blocking it now?

I have no other popup blockers installed. I started closing applications one-by-one, refreshing the webpage each time. Norton Antivirus, Google Desktop Search — No luck. Something’s still blocking it. Finally, I looked at IE and noticed something I’d forgotten about (considering I just got back from Half Dome – more on that later). The Yahoo toolbar. It has its own popup blocker as well.

I finally set that to allow popups, and Guinness’s popup finally appeared. It was a request to “Join” the site and sign up for the free newsletter.

Note to webmasters: popups are dead. Don’t try to force it on the visitor. Opening things in new windows should be a function of the browser, not your site. Integrate links to newsletter info, etc. directly on your page, not off it. For the humans behind the browsers, learn to use the Ctrl and Shift keys, and use them when desired.