Though the number of pop-up ads increased significantly in 2002, a survey the following year found that more than three-quarters of Internet users called them “very annoying.”Īs frustration grew, advertisers turned to other options enabled by higher-speed connections. (Later, pop-up blocking became a standard feature of browsers.) Adware like Gator’s added to the discontent. Within a year or two, companies were selling software with names like PopupCaptor and AdSubtract to block the interruptions. “The pop-up and pop-under ads were just massively annoying and a pain in everbody’s rear end,” LeFurgy says. In another reviled innovation, the pop-under, windows opened behind your browser and surprised you later. Eventually, these were even made to look like banners and placed on the screen to cover up existing ads from rival companies. The Gator program tracked where you went online and delivered pop-up ads to match your interests. In 1999, a company called Gator started issuing free software that helped fill out online forms, but it was a Trojan horse for its advertising engine. Either way, the format quickly spawned several noxious offshoots. Some wondered if the pop-ups’ rates were bogus: Maybe users were confused by extra windows and clicked them by mistake. “We could have put in controls for those, and we should have,” Eich said. If a banner ad just sat there in the corner of the screen, a pop-up would make you stop what you were doing. For the first time, an advertisement on the Internet could get right in your face, like a commercial on TV. Online marketers saw the feature as a way to drum up sales. Among them was the ease with which pop-ups could be exploited. “It was an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it,” Eich said in a 2012 interview with Computer magazine. Elements could slide around or blink in response to user input. Where pages had been inert and clogged with text, they now had wiggle room, and it was thanks to Eich’s language - called JavaScript. But over a 10-day stretch that May, Eich, a Netscape programmer and an amateur gymnast, worked up a new way to program on the web. When Brendan Eich set out to liven up the Internet in the spring of 1995, online ads were always banners: branded rectangles tucked into a home page.
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