Lisa Guernsey NYT
Monday, November 3, 2003
The Google toolbar, a thin row of buttons and a query window that sits within the Internet Explorer browser, has become a big hit, with millions of people using it each day. Last summer it attracted even more users when Google added a pop-up blocker to the toolbar's features, effectively filtering the unsolicited advertisements that appear along with many Web pages.
"Google Toolbar is great for stopping pop-ups," one user in a public newsgroup wrote last weekend. On the same day, a fan of the toolbar in a forum about free software crowed, "Up to 2,190 pop-ups blocked!" Dozens of similar postings can be found across the Internet.
But Google's blocker and others like it are having unintended consequences for some Web designers. Over the years, growing numbers of Web sites have been designed to include pop-up windows that are not advertising and that users may consider helpful rather than annoying. These legitimate pop-ups - like calendar updates and explanations of new navigation features - enable designers to alert visitors to news without substantially revising the home page.
But today many such pop-ups never see the light of day. "Visitors will load a site that is supposed to have a 'Welcome' message and they won't even know that they missed it," said Greg Franseth, the manager of Web services at the University of Kentucky. Recently, he said, many graduate students at the university failed to learn about a major schedule change that was posted on a departmental Web page "because they didn't get the pop-up."
Google's software is designed to unobtrusively alert users whenever a pop-up is being blocked by flashing a quick starburst of yellow near the user's cursor. It also enables users to tell Google which sites they want to exclude from pop-up restrictions. But, as Google acknowledges, if a person arrives on a page and notices that a pop-up has been blocked, there is no way to retrieve that pop-up to see what was missed.
Solid numbers on how many people have installed pop-up blockers are hard to come by, but in the past year large Internet service providers like America Online and MSN have offered the software to their customers. Dozens of stand-alone software products can be downloaded free, or for a small fee, from the Web.
Web site designers are resigned, at least for now, to the loss of the pop-up window as a tool. "At this point, designers just have to abandon unsolicited pop-ups," said Thomas Brunt, president of OutFront, a site for Web developers.
But even then, they may face other problems. While blockers like Google's are designed to keep out only those pop-ups that were not requested by the user, a few products have the effect of blocking anything that opens in a new browser window. Sites with windows that open after a visitor has clicked on a link are unusable by those who have installed such pop-up blockers.
Franseth and his staff are now busy redesigning the University of Kentucky's Web pages to eliminate pop-up windows - largely by updating them more frequently - while also trying to alert students about the risks of some blocking software. Web developing sites like
www.sitepoint.com and Outfront are peppered with chatter about how to cope with the proliferation of blockers.
"I blame the advertisers and porn sites," Franseth said. "It's yet another situation where a perfectly good technology has been rendered useless because someone out there has decided to abuse it."
The New York Times