Wednesday, 31 December 2025
If you were an Internet user for a few years on either side of the turn of the millennium, you will remember pop-up advertisements.
Two pop-up ad windows displayed over the legitimate website in the background. (Screenshot from HowStuffWorks. April, 2002.)
A poorly-considered web browser feature allowed website authors to open new browser windows on your computer containing some other website. This was quickly abused to show ads to users. You’d visit a website and receive an ad that covered up the contents you were there to view until you closed the ad. As the ad technology developed, the ads would use various misleading features to become more deceptive and harder to dismiss.
In a short time, the situation got so bad that web browsers started deploying built-in pop-up blocking technology to improve web browsing for their users. This was a major feature. News articles were written about it. It was a major selling point for Firefox’s first 1.0 release in 2004. Later that year, Microsoft made the news by enabling pop-up blocking by default in their popular Internet Explorer web browser.
News article highlighting new pop-up blocking in Internet Explorer. (InternetNews.com. March, 2004.)
This did fix the pop-up problem, for a time. The web browser developers had done a good job, and they moved on to implementing other features. Unfortunately, the ad developers didn’t give up.
A modern pop-up ad, ironically displayed on top of a 2004 article about how bad pop-up ads are. (Washington Post. November, 2003. (Retrieved December, 2025.))
Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever. The pop-up ad developers have evolved to work around browser’s built-in pop-up blockers, but web browser developers haven’t been keeping up in the arms race. The same patterns from the early 2000s are all back again: popping up at random times to intercept your interactions; needless distractions covering up what you intended to view; misleading or difficult-to-find dismissal buttons.
A mobile pop-up ad displayed over shopping results. (Landyachtz.com. (Retrieved December, 2025.)) Mobile pop-up ad shown over article contents. (Woodpeckers.com. (Retrieved December, 2025.))
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