[inimino]

Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).

[rocky1138]

Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.

[nacs]

And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.

[samscully]

Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup.

Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.