Anti Pop Up Page
Welcome to my Anti Pop Up Page. As you well now the Internet today is filled with annoying banner and pop up adds.
Most free website hosting services require one or the other and sometimes both as payment for their services. I
fully support the need and right of these hosting companies to do this. Let's be honest, without the banner or
pop up adds the hosting services would need to charge webmasters like me for their services. There would be no
way I could afford to pay to have my site on the web. But most hosting services go way to far. On Fortunecity as an
example they require both and to top it all off when you leave my site they hit you with an extra one. There is no
way that I know of to totally get rid of the banner adds but there are at least two easy solution for the pop ups.
Both have their little draw backs but over all they are very effective. One is a small program that sits on your
system tray and the other is a browser. Best part of both? They are free! Lets talk about the browser first.
Ever since Microsoft overcame Netscape as the dominant browser they have done very little to improve their product.
In my opinion, they still are the fastest, most forgiving to coding mistakes and the most user friendly browser
around. But they are missing some key elements that other browsers have. One of those key elements is the internal
pop up blocker. Microsoft won't be adding that element until late 2004 when they are scheduled to release the next
version of I.E. But there is a browser on the market right now that already kills all pop ups. That browser is
Mozzilla Firefox 0.9. Please note the version number, the 0.9 indicates that it is still a preview version. This means
it is still under development and therefore it will still have a few bugs. I have been using this version's predecessors
Firebird 0.7 and Firefox 0.8 since October of 2003 and I am very please. In six months of use I did not get a single
pop up. But as I said it is not perfect! That is why I keep both I.E and Firefox on my computer, but Firefox is the
default browser. When I installed Firefox I had no problem setting it as the default browser, nor have I experienced
any problems with both browsers co-habiting on my computer. So until Microsoft catches up, I will use Firefox as my
default browser. Click the link below to get more information. Oh by the way their E-mail program Thunderbird is also
better than Outlook or Outlook express for spam filtering. Try them both!
If you don't want to change from your current browser and still want to get rid of the pop ups you can use my second
solution. Below is the link to Panicware's Pop Up Stopper. There is a free version and there is a pro version in which
you will need to pay for the download. The free version works about 90% of the time. You can set the preferences so that
it will start when you start your computer and then it sits in your system tray and blocks most all pop ups. You can
configure the program to do so silently, with sound or with a visual notification. There is one problem with it though.
If you try and open a second browser page or if the link you click on tries to open in a new window the Pop Up Stopper
looks at it as a pop up and it will not allow it to open. From what I read this is only prevalent in the free version,
the pro version learns not to do this. But all in all I like the program and it works very well. Try It!
