Pop-up ads or pop-ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means as well.
A variation on the pop-up window is the pop-under advertisement, which opens a new browser window hidden under the active window. Pop-unders do not interrupt the user immediately and are not seen until the covering window is closed, making it more difficult to determine which web site opened them.
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Opera was the first major browser to incorporate tools to block pop-up ads; the Mozilla browser later improved on this by blocking only pop-ups generated as the page loads. In the early 2000s, all major web browsers except Internet Explorer allowed the user to block unwanted pop-ups almost completely. In 2004, Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, which added pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer.
Most modern browsers come with pop-up blocking tools; third-party tools tend to include other features such as ad filtering.
A combination of a banner ad and a popup window is the "hover ad", which uses DHTML to appear in front of the browser screen. With the use of JavaScript, an advertisement can be superimposed over a webpage in a transparent layer. This advertisement can appear as almost anything the author of the advertisement wants. For example, an advertisement can contain an Adobe Flash animation linking to the advertiser's site. An advertisement can also look like a regular window. Because the advertisement is a part of the web page, it cannot be blocked with a pop-up blocker, but it can be blocked with third-party ad blockers such as Adblock or by using custom style sheets. DHTML ads can be very CPU intensive, sometimes bogging down older computers to the point of unusability.
Pop-under ads are similar to pop-up ads, but the ad window appears hidden behind the main browser window rather than superimposed in front of it. As pop-up ads became widespread and took up whole computer screens, many users learned to immediately close the popup ads that appeared over a site without looking at them. Pop-under ads do not immediately impede a user's ability to view the site content, and thus usually remain unnoticed until the main browser window is closed or minimized, leaving the user's attention free for the advertisement.
A pop-under ad involves two very simple JavaScript technologies introduced in 1997 with the Netscape 2.0B3 browser. This methodology has been used widely across the web. Modern web publishers and advertisers utilize this methodology to create a window in front of the users screen, load an advertisement, and then send it behind the screen.
// create a new window in front of the current site window.open( URL, windowName[, windowFeatures] ); // push the loaded advertisement back behind the browser window.focus();
Users of websites and web applications continuously experience unwanted pop up ads through the course of their normal interaction with a web browser. Ordinarily users respond by dismissing the pop-up through the "close" or "cancel" feature of the window hosting the pop-up. Because this is a typical response, some authors of pop-up advertising depend on this, and create on-screen buttons or controls that look similar to a "close" or "cancel" option. When the user chooses one of these "simulated cancel" options, however, the button performs an unexpected or unauthorized action (such as opening a new pop-up, or running unauthorized commands on the user's system).[2]
Because the technologies for web development and design allow an author to draw any kind of "simulated" cancel option imaginable, some users refuse to click on or interact with any item inside a pop-up window whatsoever.[2]
ExitExchange.com filed for a patent in 2000 on a subset of pop-under advertising called an exit pop. Exit pops were first introduced by the ExitExchange corporation in 1999; when a visitor leaves a website, they receive another site or ad. After years of controversy and numerous articles on the pop-under patent, the patent was awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in April and June of 2008. The respective patent numbers are 7,386,555 and 7,353,229. Patent 7,386,555 is related to the method of opening an exit pop from a toolbar or software application on a computing device, whereas Patent 7,353,229 covers the method used to open an exit pop from an embedded script found within a media file (e.g. JavaScript code found in a web page).