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Comments (155)

• drewfax
  Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas.It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
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  Tzk
  No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
• chrisjj
  [delayed]
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  tantivy
  I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
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  SunshineTheCat
  I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
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  benregenspan
  > Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than everThe article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
• 1313ed01
  NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.
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  asadotzler
  Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.
• tedk-42
  _continue without supporting_ is a button i like to pressAs is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
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  bambax
  Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.
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  pentagrama
  On uBlock Origin settings > Filter lists > AnnoyancesCheck all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups.[1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA
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  black_puppydog
  A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...
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  miika
  It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies.Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
• _el1s7
  The author seems to be confusing third party ad pop-ups with promotional modals from websites.
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  chrsw
  I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted.I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
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  greatgib
  For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites.When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
• eloisius
  I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
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  sixthDot
  The bigest anoyance nowadays (in the EU at least) is rather the cookie policy agreement. "View the list of our 258 partners", etc.
• swiftcoder
  Ironically, they do still block the actual pop-up window my bank tries to spawn during 2fac sign-inAll while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on
• butz
  Reader view works pretty nicely against most modal annoyances.
• zx8080
  Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
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  wincy
  If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
• wolvoleo
  UBlock origin is pretty good at blocking those in-page popups though. You do have to add the optional Annoyances blocklists for that though.
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  darthoctopus
  I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…
• mxmilkiib
  maybe the intro etc of absurd.org could somehow happen again. a very artsy artefact of a website that utilised popups (and Java) at certain pointshttps://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...
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  rcxdude
  Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).
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  lapcat
  The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
• childintime
  Popups and Cloudflare stepping in.
• anon
  undefined
• renewiltord
  People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it.Be better.
• cadamsdotcom
  Anything so heavily abused deserves to default to off. But good luck convincing Firefox to do that, let alone the others.Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird.Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.
• kstrauser
  Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
• gethly
  i even have popup blocker extension in ff and it's not working well at all.
• jmclnx
  I noticed the same on a site I have been reading for over 30 years. I am about to abandon that site.Hope this issue is solved.
• thinkloop
  Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar
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  jart
  They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.