On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Neil Williams wrote:

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 17:33:22 +0000, Tom Anderson
wrote:

PS Does anyone know who invented popup windows? I'd like to know so
that if i ever meet him, i can BRUTALLY KILL HIM.

Try Firefox. It won't mean you can inflict bodily harm on the inventor
of such things, but it will mean you won't see them any more unless you
want to on a specific site.

True. In fact, i use Firefox on my own machine, but Mozilla at work (it's
a shared machine, so i feel slightly uncomfortable installing
just-out-of-beta software; i'm holding on for 1.1).

What was actually winding me up, though, was not on-load popups, which
Firefox suppresses very effectively, but target-new links - where you
click on a link and it gives you the target in a new window. This is
completely and utterly wrong, worthless, irritating, unusable, evil, bad,
selfish and generally not on behaviour. If i wanted the link in a new
window, i'd open it in a new window. Pray tell me, TfL maps page, what
exactly you think i'm going to do with you after opening the map i'm
after? You must think i have more in mind for you, else you'd let yourself
be replaced by the thing i asked for, LIKE WEBPAGES ARE SUPPOSED TO. Gah.
Anyway, Firefox does have single-window mode and tricks to suppress this
sort of thing, through the miracle of extensions, so i think it'll be
arriving on my desktop sooner rather than later.

The crazy thing is that there must be umpteen usability studies out there
showing that target-new links are bad, but people persist in using them. I
don't think they're doing it out of malice or other evil intent, as with
popup ads, i think they're doing it because they want to make my browsing
experience better and they genuinely think it will help. Have they never
*used* the web? Unbelievable!

Or is this just me?

Anyway, /rant.

tom

--
Michael Jackson had that idea back in the 80s. There was even a ride at Disneyland.