Posted by Michael Winter on 06/30/05 02:00

On 29/06/2005 23:50, Travis Newbury wrote:

> mark | r wrote:

[snip]

>> [Testing for pop-up blockers is] just evil, there are better ways
>> to advertise than POPUPS which just suck [...]
>
> Who says it is for advertising? I see a lot more reasons to use a
> popup window than advertising.

Yes, there are many reasonable uses for them, but abuse has all but
killed the pop-up, whether it is legitimate or not.

With regard to testing, though, that could just be exploited as another
route towards abuse. For example, some unscrupulous person might
discover that unrequested pop-ups are blocked, so they run a script that
randomly adds event listeners to links within the document that will
spawn pop-ups when clicked (I'm sure I've seen that happen already, to
some degree).

Besides, it would be a difficult thing for browsers to report in some
cases as many pop-up blockers are third-party or transparent. Though
built-in or plug-in blockers could signal that they're active, there
would still be plenty of gaps.

Mike

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Michael Winter
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