[benregenspan]

> Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever

The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.

[lmm]

On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.

[Waterluvian]

They were so much worse. They’d basically “corrupt” your system state. They were often self replicating and so you’d have to quit the whole browser to make it stop. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.

[swiftcoder]

Isn’t this mostly because browsers in that era didn’t have process isolation (and if you were on a classic Mac, there wasn’t even preemptive multitasking)?

[Jaxan]

You shouldn’t blame it on the browsers that certain websites are malicious.

[swiftcoder]

I expect the software I use to properly sanitise untrusted inputs, yes

[Jaxan]

Sure, but still, why blame (only) the browser?

[Lammy]

> Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Measure

[compass_copium]

>sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from

I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.

[wolvoleo]

Porn and privacy sites. Especially the latter still do it a LOT and they will just block you if you block the popups.

[wolvoleo]

Sorry I meant piracy sites. Not privacy. Autocorrect...

[compass_copium]

Yes, true! I forgot about ROM sites, they were the worst offenders

[encom]

One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.

Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.

[mnw21cam]

Even assuming that we lose that particular battle, I can't understand why the browsers won't make their right-click menus orthogonal and offer an "open in this tab" option.