Microsoft IE to stop pop-ups

Microsoft plans to add pop-up block­ing fea­tures to Inter­net Explorer next year as part of its Ser­vice Pack 2 update for Win­dows XP. Close on the heels of Opera, Mozilla, Fire­bird etc. Almost every other decent browser out there. Well I say, it's about time.

Microsoft plans to add pop-up block­ing fea­tures to Inter­net Explorer next year as part of its Ser­vice Pack 2 update for Win­dows XP. Close on the heels of Opera, Mozilla, Fire­bird etc. Almost every other decent browser out there. Well I say, it's about time.

Microsoft said that it won't release any fur­ther updates of Inter­net Explorer. But its "Ser­vice Packs" sound sus­pi­ciously like the mech­nism by which MS will from now on offer addi­tional functionality.

Actu­ally MS is a bit late to the party. Opera has had this func­tion since time immemo­r­ial, and Mozilla has had this func­tion since the begin­ning of the Phoenix project (now Fire­bird). Opera, Mozilla and Netscape – all of which have only a minor share of the total browser mar­ket – give users the option to seam­lessly block intru­sive adver­tis­ing while surf­ing the Web. Because Microsoft dom­i­nates the browser mar­ket, it could greatly influ­ence people's abil­ity to remove the ads with ease.

Inter­net ser­vice providers have also responded to a con­sumer out­cry against pop-ups in recent years despite poten­tial losses from adver­tis­ing sales. Earth­Link led a trend among ISPs to intro­duce anti-pop-up tools in 2002. AOL upped the ante last year by promis­ing not to sell pop-ups to third par­ties, and it released tech­nol­ogy to fend off the ads in AOL ver­sion 8.0 last Octo­ber. Microsoft matched AOL's move in its own Inter­net access soft­ware. And just this Sep­tem­ber, Yahoo and SBC Com­mu­ni­ca­tions updated their joint Inter­net access ser­vices to include a pop-up ad blocker.

Google has also given peo­ple tools to sup­press pop-ups through its pop­u­lar search toolbar.

It is not sur­pris­ing that this should hap­pen — about 88 per­cent of broad­band users and 87 per­cent of dial-up users find that pop-ups inter­fere with their Web surf­ing expe­ri­ence, accord­ing to For­rester Research. But only 15 per­cent of con­sumers have down­loaded ad-blocking soft­ware, or even know how to! Hav­ing a fea­ture inside the browser itself is a much bet­ter way of avoid­ing intru­sive pop-ups.

Only caveat, I won­der how the gazil­lion mar­keters will respond, given that pop-ups or "hyper­sti­tials" are known to be twice as effec­tive as ordi­nary ban­ner ads for mar­keters (I don't say this, Gart­ner does).

As far as I am con­cerned, I hope IE releases as many fea­tures as it wants through a new release or through the ubiq­ui­tous ser­vice packs. I use it mostly for the bank­ing web­sites that believe IE is the only secure browser on the planet and code only for IE (although Opera or Fire­bird can do just fine with all the con­tent that is actu­ally on the site!)