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Nobody likes popups. Before Firefox and popup blockers you could say that browsing was a chore. Every other site attacked you with at least a few popups that just ate up your CPU cycles, your memory, your time, and your patience. I can see why perhaps they were used though. Even people despise them, there are still those people that can’t resist clicking on them. Do they really think that if they click on the monkey they’ll actually win a prize? And I’m sure that many have been tricked into thinking that their computer actually was randomly selected to win a prize (just like millions of others). So in that sense, as annoying as popups are, advertisers had a proven reason why they are a benefit to use (a benefit to them anyways).

Since I’ve been using Firefox, the popup annoyance that used to plague my browsing experience has all but disappeared. However, there are still a couple of methods that website designers employ that still peeve me. First is the insistance by some websites to have all of their links open up in a new browser window. I can see why they would want to do this. If the site opens in a new browser window, you actually won’t be leaving their site, which increases the chances that you’ll return to their site after you finish browsing the newly opened link. In fact, I use multiple browser windows all of the time for this very reason. However, I like to decide myself when I want to open up a new window and when I don’t. In addition, usually when I want to open a link in a new window, I actually open it in a new Firefox tab and not an entirely new window. Multiple windows and tabs are crucial to properly structuring your browsing experience. But this structure should not be forced by web designers who just want to keep you on their sites.

One other annoyance that I find to be even more intrusive to my browsing style is when web designers resize my browser window. For some reason, they think that I actually want it to fill the entire screen. I experienced this insanity yesterday when I was wasting time browsing blogs through blogsoldiers.com. Every time I clicked to see the next blog, the window would be resized to fill the screen. I tried to deal with it and fix the size myself, but after it happened a few times, I just gave up. I can understand the popup ads and the new window links, but I honestly see no beneficial reason why any website designers would employ tactics like this one. It’s a good way to push visitors away rather than keep them coming back.

In any case, I like my browsing experience to be customized to my own personal style. Rather than using cutthroat tactics to trick visitors into visiting or staying, website designers should respect their users so that they have an enjoyable and unintrusive experience on their sites.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Opinion, Random Rants, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.