C|Net is reporting that Microsoft is finally getting with the times and rolling a pop-up blocker into Internet Explorer. The blocker will be included in Internet Explorer Service Pack 2, which will be released in the first half of next year.
Pop-up blockers are usually seen as positive, but in this case, they may do more harm than good. Having a pop-up blocker integrated into Internet Explorer will make it very easy for a wide range of mainstream PC users to block annoying pop-up ads, which should be great for Joe Sixpack in the long run. However, it’s unlikely that advertisers will sit idly by while the masses tune out pop-ups; advertisers may turn to more insidious ad formats that make pop-ups look innocuous.
Why couldn’t Microsoft have skipped pop-up blocking and pledged to add tabbed browsing instead?
lets see 10 IE6 browsers opened. Task Manager shows 0-2% CPU and 156M of memory out of 785M. I would say i’m tab browsing pretty efficiently.
How many of those windows can you refresh at the same time?
How many are single click accessible Without your taskbar showing?
How much of your taskbar does it take up?
Quick! Go to the 8th browser window! waiting…
Wait, what is on the fourth? alt+TAB TAB TAB TAB oh yeah, that’s TR, release Alt. What was one that fifth one? Alt TAB TAB TAB TAB.whoops missed it, ALT+SHIFT+TAB (hand falls off) Wheeeeee!
How many contain security vulnerabilitiesg{
Why are people conflating tabbed browsing with pop-up ad blocking? They are completely separate things, yes?
Yes, you are retarded.
So they do something and you all b*tch and moan about it?
Jebus.
For simplicity nothing beats the Google bar for IE . It’s nice that Microsoft gives that option as well . Being an Opera user I’ve been spoiled I guess. But Opera is not for everyone .
who cares. I use Mozilla now………….and sometimes Opera.
Tab browsing is nothing special. You people need to get out more if browsing with tabs makes you hot.
But a built in pop-up blocker… now that alone makes me wanna cream.
§[<http://indeego.com/tab1click.jpg<]§ I don't know... 1 click access to 90% of the sites I visit daily seems pretty convenient. 11-12 of those sites load instantly at startup. Probably possibly with a non-tabbed IE but it seems messy to me, not to mention all the exploits that come out hourlyg{<.<}g
I’m not sure if it is sad that my 90% sites are your 90% sites (with one addition, I go to NewsForge a lot. Other than that I bet we spend a lot of our browsing time at the same places 😉
BTW, what font is that you are using? I like it…
Have no idea. I browse at 1280×960 and people usually think my fonts are too big, but they are default windows fonts, I think, maybe 120 dpi. Maybe Georgia font. I try not to get too much out of WIndows standardsg{<.<}g Glad you have taste!
You should quit reading CNN. 😉 Is that anti-alias or it’s the JPEG that makes it look blurry? I hate anti-aliased fonts.
Otherwise I like your setup.
I don’t want to sound like a whining idiot, but for years people have been crying for IE to include a pop-up blocker, now that they have they’re getting criticised for it? I’m sure glad I’m not in this business of making products and listening to consumers…
You have to consider who’s complaining…
[ITALIC]now that they have they’re getting criticised for it[/ITALIC]
Does, or at any time in the past, has Tech Report used any pop up advertising?
Is the pressure from ad agencies increasing to the point where, or ad impression payments dropping to the point where Tech Report may have to change their policy in the future and possibly accept popups?
And what happens when a new feature comes along that threatens possible ad revenue?
I can’t answer the popup question, as I don’t have images turned on, and with Konqueror, I haven’t seen a pop up ad in years thanks to their support for pop up blocking for quite some time now. Saves tremendously on bandwidth/response time too.
Mass distribution of popup killing through IE in Windows = bad for us.
If thousands of computer smarties blocked popups, it wouldnt be a big deal.
If the sun came up tomorrow and popups became obsolete because most of the world has blockers, then the advertisers will get around it one way or another, and ALL of us will feel the sting.
Too little too late. MyIE2 already does tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and a host of other features that IE 6 does not. If someone wants to still use the IE core and have all these features, they should just go with a third party extension like this. The alternatives such as Firebird/Mozilla and Opera are excellent as well. I see no reason to wait around for M$ to use these necessary features. I personally couldn’t live without tabbed browsing.
Like #29 stated, Opera is a lean beast. Mozilla and Firebird are both beasts, but they are nowhere near as lean as Opera is “out of the box”. Moreso, using Opera has a different “flavor” to it compared to the other two.
I was particularly taken with the mouse gestures technology (which, admittedly can be acquired for Firebird and Mozilla via plugins) and the numberous efficient keyboard shortcuts in Opera.
I will say you can’t go wrong with any of the three! And there’s nothing wrong with paying for good software.
Or for windows. Mouse gestures were around before the “creative” forces at Opera found it.
“Or for windows. Mouse gestures were around before the “creative” forces at Opera found it.”
Or for windows? What do you mean exactly? What content in my post are you referring to/answering to? Granted, mouse gestures were around before Opera. In fact I first became aware of the technology in the game, Black and White by Lionhead Studios LTD.
I never claimed Opera created the technology, and neither am I aware of any claims by Opera. It was in Opera that I was first introduced to the concept of gestures in browsers.
readysetgo
MS needs to remove the big security hole that is IE.
Patches released today should clear any misconceptions you have about their security right upg{<.<}g It'll never happen again.
Hahaha what about the security holes they don’t patch?
Instead of built-in pop-up blocking I’d rather just have IE with Google Toolbar. Autofill and the built in search box is awesome. I agree, with Geoff, forget the pop-up blocker and go with tabbed browsing instead.
Popups are entirely bad. Good job Microsoft! A little late, though.
So far I haven’t seen anything in here that Opera can do that Moz and Firebird can’t.
Could someone explain to me why anyone should choose to buy Opera or put up with the free version’s ads, when Mozilla and Firebird are free and ad-less and seem to do all the same stuff?
opera is far, far more customisable. It has on-the-fly toggling of images. Mouse gestures. Author/User mode easy toggle. Best editability of toolbar and skins. It has “Reload every x seconds/minutes” feature. Keyboard shortcuts galore. Notes feature. Context menus better than all others. Magnification. Best integrated download manger window (and best customisability of file types and where they are downloaded to – see File > Preferences > File Types). Best Hotlist feature. It is the leanest, meanest of them all. No bloat. Skins galore if that’s your thing. Great integrated mail/news. Easy one letter google (or whatever) searches, easy F12 “quick preferences”, the best pop-up blocking, the best/easiest privacy settings, the best tabbed browsing (combined with Mouse Gestures is super speedy to use), the best History pages, the best cache settings, the best “load where I left off” settings, etc.
To me it’s more of a combination of a lot of things (not the least of which is the lean and mean nature of the browser) that makes it the best overall.
Those sound great, and they are more than the default firebird has (although many more plug-ins are available for firebird.
Here are some more good things about firebird:
You can compile/build it yourself to speed up on your system, i.e. PIII PIV, athlon, etc.
It’s open source. You can be reasonably certain it won’t contain any rogue code.
It hasn’t had many of the security issues that opera has had lately.
It’ll always be free, ad-freeg{<.<}g
yes I have to say the magnification and the file downloader is great!!!!……..re-starts broken downloads where they left off (unlike Moz!!)………i.e. it is like GetRight, only FAR more stable!!!
and the speed of the app is bar none BTW.
for the life of me I simply CANNOT figurout how to add e-mail or usenet under Opera’s M2 frontend………………….I’m too dumb.
Moz is good though!……..
Moz has a great news and e-mail client. IF someone could help me figure out how to config the Opera News client and e-mail I might use it more………
Mail menu > New Account
Mail menu > Show Account
Mail menu > Manage Account
Mail menu > Newsgroups
Also the Mail icon on the toolbar will get u straight into mail. Couldn’t be simpler.
thanks………I’ll try that out. ;-).
This will be great for work if the popup blocker doesn’t retrieve any information like the other popup blockers. Other than that, I would have to agree with the post – tabbed browsing.
Tabbed browsing? Just use the task bar. Tabbed browsing is pointless, I never use it (and have had access to it for years — I only run linux).
Because it’s pointless fot you, doesn’t mean a whole bunch of other people can’t enjoy that feature. Personally, I love tabbed browsing and know other people who couldn’t browse without tabs anymore.
So, speak for yourself 🙂
the taskbar is shared with other windows apps, for one, and each window is a separate entity that can be quite hard to click, which makes switching between windows a chore, to say the least.
Of course holding down the right mouse button in Opera and using the scroll wheel to sift through a list of all open windows even when you are browsing in 50+ browser windows is also a nice touch to easily find the window you are after. So too are draggable tabs for easy sorting and prioritising of tabs – all of which are features not available with the windows taskbar, and which make browsing far more enjoyable.
Operas real revolution is the apility to open an entire folder of favorites, the joy of having 51 blogs open at the click of an button is immence. Tabbed browsing rulez
Firebird can do that, too. Just right click on a bookmarks folder and select “Open in Tabs”.
why? Duh. AOL did it and advertises it, so they have to follow suit.
Could somebody please explain to me what is the advantage of tabbed browsing over having multiple Windows?
As far as I’ve seen, I’d rather click on a link and “Open In New Window” and not lose the focus on the page I was watching. Most browsers with “Open In New Tab” I’ve seen make you lose the focus on the page you were reading and go to the new page…
Firebird and Mozilla both let you open tabs in the background.
opera does that as well
Mozilla, properly configured. I middle-click a link, the page loads in a tab, in the background (current page does not lose focus).
Has anyone seen the ad’s they are running in the AIM client now? With video and sound? AND YOU CAN’T MAKE IT STOP. I am severely peturbed by it when I’m at work talking to my boss, and a trailer for Elf starts playing.
nope, because GAIM isn’t showing them! (The official Linux AIM client is horrible anyway)
gaim.sourceforge.net
One word: Jabber!
§[<http://www.jabber.org<]§
BUT jabber won’t connect to AIM… which all 40 of my people i talk to use.
Yes it does, all 4 MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo. You just have to use a server which has the AIM transport enabled.
§[<http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers.php<]§
Sounds like AOL is right on the path for alienizing what few customers they have left. COngrats g{
Another trick that’s been annoying me is whenever the ad changes, the “Buddy List” window steals focus from the IM window. Have to keep the damn thing minimized now.
Get Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird — it is completely free, has tabbed browsing (which, frankly, is nothing special to me, and I really don’t see why people jump for joy about it — at times it’s considerably less convienent than having multiple windows open), has pop-up blocking (default on, defeatable per site), ad blocking (configurable per site), and a bunch more. I run Firebird 0.7 at home and work and it’s fast, stable, and doesn’t have any problems rendering sites. There’s an occasional site that has IE-isms, but I have an extension installed to let me open up the very same page in IE. I have another extension installed that blocks Flash unless I click on the Flash banner (best of both worlds — Flash if I need/want it, but no annoying Flash advertisements).
As for the topic — MS sorely needed to add pop-up blocking to IE. Yes, some advertisers will adapt around it. But that’s not an excuse to not add it, given how miserable Internet surfing can be without it.
Personally I tried Firebird on 3 different machines and it was horribly and noticeable slower than IE on all 3 systems. SLow to load up, slow to load images, slow to open new windows, etc… I tried it on machines as slow as 600mhz celeron with 64 megs ram, and win2k, up to a 1.8ghz p4 with 512 megs ram, and winxp… they all had the same story… sloooooow…
I don’t know if/what I did wrong, but that browser for me sucked ass in it’s stock configuration. I didn’t do any configuration of it at all…
I DID love the flash stuff, like what your mentioning, but that’s it…
I’m with you in the fact that I don’t care about tabbed browsing. Personally I hate it, and cannot stand it at all… I don’t see why everyone wet’s themselves over it…
Actually, opera is free.
Depends on your definition of free. If you don’t mind giving up that upper-right portion of your screen for ads then yes it might as well be free. I think most people would disagree with that sentiment though.
So is the reply button. Available to you at no extra charge.
Get Opera. Nuff said.
Opera ain’t free… nuf said
Depends what you know. Ive said enough.
Warezing software to deprive sites of ad revenue. What a noble gerbil.
:-r[
We need to get rid of unsolicited pop-ups… end of story.
Concerning more insidious forms of advertising, try the gamespy.com network or espn.com for examples. They either have full page advertising jump pages or animated ads built into the page. The replacements for pop-ups are already here.
We need competition, and we need people to realize that developing and maintaining web sites isn’t free.
If you have both, you will eventually have what you’re looking for… probably for a small fee or not-so-insidious advertising.
If you don’t, web sites can always get around to make you swallow ads.
Well, I’ve tried it and found heaven.
What’s so good about tabbed browsing? I’ve tried it and found it unnecessary.
Tabbed browsing AND pop-up blocking – 2 of the biggest reasons I use Firebird and not IE. I’ll never use another browser that does not support tabbed browsing, it’s like going back to the dark ages.
IE needs to get with the times!
12+ sites at once open at once. Less mess on your system, After you use it you wonder why you used separate windows before. Basic organization. i.e. At one glance I can tell what site I have open and quickly glance at it’s status, whereas with IE you have to switch to it’s window to tellg{<.<}g
Ever read a story with links to other sites? When I see links in a story that interest me, I’d like to get to them eventually, but I want to finish the story first. I can middle click a link and it’ll open in the background in a new tab. It won’t steal the focus and it won’t steal a place on my taskbar (if I was using one, that is). I can also visit a site like slashdot, and open up all the articles and discussions I’m interested in at once, and then read them all in order. I can also click on subthreads to view later.
It’s also great for browsing slow forums. I can click on as many threads as I want to load in the background and then after I’m done looking at the list of threads, the first thread will be loaded, and by the time I’m done reading that, the rest of the tabs will be done loading. This can work on any other slow site too. In one window, I can which of my tabs are loading and which are done loading (Galeon will also show you which tabs are visited and which are not).
If I’ve got to shutdown/restart to change hardware or something, I can also bookmark every single tab at once and then pick up where I left off easily.