Pesky Internet Popups Driving You Insane?

The pop-ups name gives away what it does - it does what it says on the tin. Pop-ups are those little advertisements that literally pop up on your computer when you're surfing around the Internet. They're designed to attract visitors to advertisers websites or to collect your e-mail address or other marketing information that you'll be haunted with forever.

JavaScript is usually used to generate those pop-ups appearing on your screen. JavaScript is a simple programming language that software designers use. They can be integrated into the HTML that's used to build websites so this integration makes it a lot easier for people to generate these pop-ups from a few lines of code on a website.

Sometimes pop-ups aren't always evil and annoying though. You might click on a link in a pop-up and it will ask you for further information from the website you are visiting. For example, you might be asked for your e-mail address so you can receive e-mails from the site or if you're at a music site, for example, pop-ups are often used as a type of external media player window.

JavaScript controls the elements displayed in the window as well is the size of the window. Because the status bar or the menus can be hidden by the designer of the pop-up, it can be impossible to navigate away from the pop up, unless you close the window using the ""x"" in the top right corner, or you accidentally or intentionally click on add and go to the advertiser's website.

Although pop-up windows are annoying, they can get even more annoying. This can happen when they're designed to be intentionally malicious. This form of JavaScript creates multiple windows, so that when you close one window, lots more of them open up. You can easily get caught in an endless cycle of trying to close out windows only to open more windows. Usually the only answer is to completely close your browser down or sometimes even totally reboot your computer to get rid of them.

Another common type of pop-up that's being used these days is created using flash software. This kind of pop-up follows your mouse, or floats around on the page as you scroll through the browser window. These can be particularly annoying because they're very hard to close down. Sometimes these are just pranks but it's annoying to have your browser taken over by something like that.

In addition to these pop-ups, which are created with flash and JavaScript, 'adware' can create ads that pop up based on the content that's on the webpage, or the content you click on. Sometimes adware is just advertising-supported software that displays ads when you use a particular program, but often adware refers to small programs that deliver targeted advertising based on the content on the page you're visiting. The program may look for specific keywords on the webpage and then generate ads based on those keywords.

And for those advertisers who have become very clever there's a new thing called a 'pop under'. This ad is not seen by you until you close your browser window and then you will see the pop-up on your computer screen. These aren't as annoying as the standard pop-ups that cover your computer screen, but they can still be annoying.

Because people are often annoyed by pop-ups and don't necessarily welcome them, nearly every web browser designer has created some kind of anti-pop-up software. You can keep the ""no pop- ups"" choice on or off depending on your preferences. If for some reason your browser doesn't have a built-in popup blocker than just download the Google Toolbar and use the nifty popup blocker included in that.