Now, while this might sound good, it has a couple of serious downsides. The obvious one is the same one that plagues all pop-up blockers: discrimination. How does it determine what is an advertising pop-up and what is a legit pop-up window of the site? Now, hopefully, MS will take a cue from Proxomitron and use an 'unLoad reloader', but we'll have to wait and see. Still, having one integrated with the browser will be a nice touch, since most people don't have a clue how (and are afraid) to download one from the Net and install it.
However, this brings up the second downside. When you exterminate for bugs in your house, the only ones that live are those that are immune...thus breeding immune bugs. Same goes for antibodies in your own immune system. When you make a filter of some sort mainstream to block annoying bullshit like spam and pop-ups, then the industry creates new things to get around those filters. Spam filters are only as good as how they detect, and spammers find new things to say/create that are not detected, right? Hell, remember when the worst you had to deal with was ad banners on websites? Then they stepped up and made them Java and Flash bits. Then the pop-up windows came...and then the infamous pop-UNDER. Now, you find these damn ad dealies that aren't actually a new window, just something that appears/slides over the page, and has to be manually closed...can't even be blurred to the back or moved, and aren't stopped by pop-up blockers. SO, make pop-ups blocked as a default, and what comes next? That's what *I'M* concerned about.
One thing I do really like in this article: "Advertisers love them because they grab customers' attention. "They're very successful," says Geoff Silvers, director of e-marketing for travel site Orbitz, a big user of pop-under ads. But users hate them. Forty percent of U.S. consumers recently surveyed by Jupiter Research said pop-ups are the most annoying form of online ads -- even more than hated e-mail spam, which 29% ranked as the most annoying." 40% hate them? Doesn't sound too successful to me. Chalk that up to another thing I hate about this place: advertisers more concerned with annoying the fuck out of you than selling you a product.
