20 February 2002

Pop-up ads are the irritating little adverts that appear when you visit some web pages. A pop-up is usually an ad, but it may be a survey or an alert. Unfortunately they have become so common they have quickly become irritating.

Like all ads the point of pop-ups is to get your attention. The worst places for pop-up ads are at the free hosting sites where the hosting company inserts ads to pay for the space on their servers. But commercial web sites use them too.

Not all pop-ups are useless adverts. Some websites use pop-ups for surveys and alerts. Most of the pop-up killing programs have a by-pass function that allows you to open pop-up when you want them.

There are many free programs that can block ads. Some just block the pop-up ads while others offer features to help manage cookies, security and startup applications. If you want to use one of these programs you must use one designed for your browser and operating system.

Running a pop-up killer does have some disadvantages. Disabling pop-ups will affect some e-mails, programs and web pages. More importantly, it is another program running in the background, using some of your system resources.

If pop-up ads are irritating you, download a pop-up remover and see how it goes. If you don't like the program remember to uninstall it properly. We described how to remove programs a few weeks ago.

Popup removers

We have a list of free anti pop-up programs and links below. There are a lot of programs that you can try or purchase. These are just a few of the programs available.

Popup Stopper For Windows users using Internet Explorer and Netscape.

Popup Killer

Winpatrol Does more than just suppress the popups, has many other system utilities included.

Webwasher. Works for Mac and Linux users as well as Windows.

Further resources

BBC on-line article about pop-up ads.