Ajax Girl

Nat Torkington on the O’Reilly Radar recently commented on the rise of “floats” (AKA “divdows”, “Ajax dialogs”).

One of the really big issues facing us, IMHO, is the new Javascript-driven ad technology called “floats”. They’re not separate windows popped up, they’re in-window divs that move up to obscure the web page and force the user to click to dismiss them. They can’t trivially be blocked because they’re generated by Javascript code within the page, and identifying such code is a similar problem to identifying viruses. They ruin the user’s experience by being unavoidable and maximally intrusive.

At the moment they’re rare (e.g., TVNZ and MSN only show them once per user per day) but if we learned anything from 2001 it’s that greed will ruin user experience if it can get an extra buck in ad revenue. We got popup blockers as a result of the 2001 popup orgy. What’s going to save us from the 2007 float invasion?

It’s really not as scary as it sounds, as these new popups can only live inside the tab/window of the app that launched them - sites that run annoying Ajax popups are only doing themselves a disservice, the web equivalent of nagware. Christian Flury has outlined the counter-arguments.

• Javascript pop-up windows left a trace in your working environment: Even after leaving the page that had triggered them, you still had those few additional browser windows open – and those were the days before tabbed-browsing became popular, so it was already difficult enough to stay on top of your zillions of open browser windows
• Psychologically, from a site owner’s perspective, a pop-up window is not as closely associated with your page as an ad that occupies your own real estate, so to speak.
• More importantly, back in the olden days, it was far from obvious, especially to the not so tech-savvy, which page had actually triggered the pop-up window.

That said, there are still security implications - with richer graphics and browser scripting, it’s easier to pretend you’re a native OS dialog box.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/popup-nightmare-20