[rchaud]

The popups you're thinking of were much more harmful than these. Those were separate browser windows that opened third-party sites and downloaded and ran insecure code.

This is a popup in the visual sense. Although to be fair lots of sites use third-party scripts to handle these email asks, so maybe it's not that different!

[gspencley]

You're certainly not wrong about the malware / insecure code...

But a popup that opens an in-page modal vs a popup that opens a new tab or window are pretty much equivalent from a user experience point of view in my opinion. I don't want either, and neither is less or more evil to me.

[bgirard]

At least the pop-up windows had a consistent way to close them and you could use keyboard shortcut. Now I have to think about the right way to close each custom popup.

[Tommstein]

With the back button, if a random click/tap outside the popup doesn't do it.