Popup Ads
(or Maybe it's Messenger!)
Don't you just hate all those popup ads when you are surfing the net? There are a lot of programs available to stop them, some work better than others. You can just bring up Google, type in 'popup stopper' and you can take your pick from what comes up. Speaking of Google, they are coming up with a lot of goodies in their labs. A lot of my friends are raving about the Google Toolbar and the fact IT STOPS POPUPS!
There is confusion about Messenger because Microsoft in its' infinite wisdom, named two totally separate programs/utilities 'Windows Messenger'. Plain old Windows Messenger is an instant messenger, like Yahoo, MSN, etc., available for all Windows systems. 'Windows Messenger Service' is another thing altogether. It was intended mainly for letting people on an internal network know instantly something important, like 'The system is going down in five minutes, save your work and log off '. Some clever spammer figured out a way to get into this system to send spam. Windows Messenger Service is only in Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Pop unders are just as irritating to me as popups. My firewall stops most of them. The Google Bar will stop popups and it is free.
Some pop unders these days are driven by JavaScript. Unless you have JavaScript disabled, you will still get those annoying pop unders. Some sites just don't seem to care how much they annoy surfers! I tend to not go back to sites that use these tactics. A fairly new tactic is to use JavaScript to cause a mini popup when your cursor moves over a word. If you want to read the text beneath the mini popup you have to close it. Very irritating! These are known as IntelliTXT ads and when you see a word on a page with two underlines, that word will cause the ad to popup if your cursor touches that word.
Firefox has a built in Popup stopper that really works great! But it doesn't stop those nasty pop-unders!