Revenge of the pop-ups It's been barely two months since Microsoft made a pop-up blocker available for its Internet Explorer browser--but Web advertisers have already found a way to slip their loathed marketing pitches past it. "Pop-ups are a cat-and-mouse game," said Bart Decrem, a spokesman for the Mozilla Foundation, creator of Firefox. "We are continually improving our pop-up blocker, and content developers are constantly developing a way to get around the pop-up blockers."

For those of you who don’t know, I wrote the very first popup blocker way back in 1998. The first at least as far as I know anyway. It started when the webmaster of nonags.com posted a message on the forums one day about his frustration that there were no known popup stoppers. Close Popup was born! Of course, it didn’t take long for everyone and their dog to write a popup blocker and then after not working on it for two years (why?) I discontinued it.

I was thrilled when web browsers actually started including popup blocking IN the browsers, something that should have been years earlier. It’s interesting to see the battle unfold. I, of course, hope all the popup advertisers die a slow and painful death. :-P