Pop-up ad

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Dozens of pop-up ads covering a desktop.

Pop-up ads or popups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to increase web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window 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.

1 Pop-up blocking
- 1.1 Blocking of legitimate "pop-ups"
- 1.2 Circumventing pop-up blockers
2 Pop-Under Ads
3 Pop-up generators
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

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.

Many websites use pop-ups to display information without disrupting the page currently open. For example, if you were to fill in a form on a web page and needed extra guidance, a pop-up would give you extra information without losing any information already entered into the form. Most pop-up blockers will allow this kind of pop-up, however, some will reload the page, losing any information that was entered.
Some web based installers such as that used by McAfee use a pop-up to install software.
On many internet browsers, holding down the ctrl key while clicking a link will allow it to bypass the popup filter.

Advertisers continually seek ways to circumvent such restrictions. For example, some pop-up ads are generated using Adobe Flash. Since pop-up blockers only blocked the JavaScript method, the Flash method would bypass the pop-up blocker.

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 a 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 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, 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, leaving the user's attention free for the advertisement.

A popup generator is a computer application used to design, produce, store, install and maintain popup advertisements. Popup generators vary from simple ones that generate blockable old-style annoying popups, to complex and sophisticated computer software applications, used to develop feature rich popup ads and hover ad windows.