Internet Explorer and Pop-ups

The quickest and easiest way to prevent pop-ups from appearing in your browser would be to disable all scripting abilities inside your browser. To do this in IE, just go to Tools > Internet Options, click the Security tab and then Custom Levels, and disable Active Scripting under Scripting.

But if you do this you'll soon realize that the Internet as you know it quickly becomes useless. Just about every site on the Internet uses some sort of scripting, be it JavaScript or Java, to enhance the user experience through JavaScript, DHTML, or Cascading Style Sheets.

No scripting means no image roll-overs, style sheets, dynamic or cascading menus, or pop-up windows, of coarse. Before you decide to augment the way you view the Web, we have a few other viable solutions for you.

Get Google's help

The new Google Toolbar 2.0, a small Internet Explorer add-on, includes a great built-in pop-up blocker. To activate it, click Google and choose Options. Make sure you're on the Options tab. Check Popup under Accessories, and click OK. You'll get rid of those pesky pop-ups and gain the ability to search with Google from your IE toolbar.

Smash, punish, and destroy

A few good freeware applications called PopupVanish and Free Surfer mk II will actively stop pop-ups. You have to OK which sites are allowed to let them through.  Another free program, Analog X Pow!, works a little differently. It automatically detects pop-up windows and lets you decide what you want to do with them.

How pop-up blockers work

While most pop-up windows contain nothing more than advertising, some of them are integral to a site's navigation and style. Therefore, the solution that many pop-up-slaying programs have implemented is to let you blacklist pop-up windows as they appear. Once you blacklist a pop-up window it will never appear again.

Since each webpage has a title, you manage your blacklist by tracking webpage titles. Pow! even lets you use wild cards to configure blacklisted pop-up windows.  Let's say that a certain pop-up window has a title of "Exclusive Deal of the Day for 10/08/2003." If the date were to change every day, it wouldn't register as a pop-up window on your blacklist. Pow! lets you use an asterisk as a wild card and configure your own blacklist option of "Exclusive Deal of the Day *" so everything that begins with "Exclusive Deal of the Day" remains blacklisted.

Another great feature of Pow! is that it will let you import blacklists from other people who use the program. This could become handy as it takes diligence to ban every pop-up window that appears on your screen.