Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 463.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 07:08:19 +0000
From: Robin Smith <rasmith@aristotle.tamu.edu>
Subject: Re: 17.459 taking exception to popups
On the subject of popup ads: I assume readers of this list are aware
that popups only work because browsers allow them to, so the easiest
way to prevent them is to configure the browser so as not to give
the popups the necessary support (for instance, by disallowing the
opening of new windows by javascript, by not allowing images to
open in new windows (or at least not if the image being fetched is
not from the same host as the page it's included in), etc. There
are plenty of browsers that allow the needed flexibility in
configuration: Mozilla (and its relatives) Konqueror, Opera to
name a few. However, as I understand it (and I'm going on hearsay
since I haven't used a Microsoft system in about three years),
Internet Explorer doesn't have the needed flexibility in configuration,
probably because it's as much a vehicle for the distribution of
advertising as it is a web browser. A web browser that lets
you shut down popups is like a TV that lets you turn off
commercials; *you* might like to have such a TV, but commercial
broadcasters wouldn't like that at all.
I do most of my web browsing with lynx (and with cookies only by
confirmation). I miss the eye candy that way, but on the other
hand it's enormously faster (especially over a slow link) and in
most cases gives me the text information I actually want (it's
astonishing how little real information many web sites contain,
apart from the decorations: rather like Powerpoint presentations,
actually). Allowing cookies only by explicit confirmation can be
a bit of an annoyance if a site wants to set, say, fifty cookies
(and there are plenty that try to set ten or more). But do you
really want all that being dropped onto your disk without your
knowledge?
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