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Defeating Pop-up Advertisements

If you've been using the world wide web for any amount of time, you're probably already familiar with "pop ups". While visiting a website, one or more new windows may appear on your screen without doing anything. Some sites use this for a useful purpose, such as option menus or a quick way to show information you've requested. Other sites may use this for surveys and advertisements which may be acceptable or outright annoying. Especially annoying is when you can't close them fast enough!

Some pop-ups aren't even caused by visiting a website. Sometimes there may be a program installed on the computer that will pop up windows regardless of what you are doing. These may be installed as a toolbar on your web browser (such as Xupiter) or completely hidden from view. They are usually included with various software packages downloaded from the Internet. These programs may also be a privacy concern since they generally collect information about your web browsing in order to display advertising to you. Tools for removing these programs are listed below.

Blocker Tools
There are a few free tools out there that you can use to defeat unwanted pop-ups and make the web a less annoying place. One such tool is the Google Toolbar. Google is probably by far the most popular seach engine on the Internet. They have released a browser toolbar that makes Google searching always available, but more importantly in this case, the 2.0 version now provides pop-up blocking.

• Google Toolbar
• Panicware Pop-Up Stopper

Web Browsers
Several web browsers now offer built-in popup blocking. If you're currently running a browser without this ability such as Internet Explorer, or an older version of one of these (such as Netscape), it may be worthwhile to investigating switching (or upgrading) browsers.

• Camino - MacOS X
• Mozilla - Windows, MacOS X, Linux
• Netscape 7 - Windows, MacOS X, Linux
• Opera - Windows, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD

Advertising Software "Ad-ware" Removal Tools
Some software on the Internet promises to enhance your experience, provide useful toolbar functions, but what they don't tell you is that they will be using intrusive advertising. These may pop up windows on your screen, even if no other applications are running. Here are a couple of utilities that will remove these advertising programs:

• Lavasoft Ad-Aware
• SpyBot Search & Destroy