vsbabu.org

Why I hate Popup windows

Aaarghhh. I’ve had it with people putting content in popup windows. Guys, however well you designed your window - using flash, animated GIFs, colorful scrollbars with IE - if your content is in popup, it sucks. And it does not keep the visitor on your site.

Here’s why:

- Perhaps you are not aware of it, but there are people with smaller monitors and large resolution. Your carefully designed window with fixed fonts etc goes for a toss in these environments. You are positively evil if you turn off scrollbars in your pages too.
- My version of IE 5.5 at home is what I got from AT&T. It has a bug in that any popup window’s content will time out. I need to stop it, then hit refresh in the window to see it. Thanks to you, menu bar is hidden in the popup, so I need to hit CTRL-R to refresh. No thank you, I’ll hit close button instead.
- Most of the time I use Opera or Mozilla, in Linux. Both these browsers support tabbed windows interface and I love it. Browsing your site is not the only thing I’m doing all the time. I’ve other applications open. When your window pops up, it adds that much clutter to my task bar. If I want to open in a new window, I’ll right click and do so.
- Most of the time, I simply close a popped up window or a link opening in a new window before it even fills up with content. I’ve observed this among other users too.
- Oh, my proxy server also kills these things considering them to be advertisements.

Still not convinced? Read top 10 mistakes of web design and grow up. A site you make is for others to see and not for you to salivate over.

"Just because you know Javascript doesn’t mean that you need to put it everywhere you can. Good design is not in deciding what to use, but most of the time what not to use."

Then go and educate your marketing bosses or graphic artists about the fact that web is a new medium. Ask them how would they like it if while reading a magazine a page just jumped right at their face again and again.

1. FREE COUPONS!!! Print them from your own computer!

   Posted by: betsey Wolfson on November 18, 2003 04:42 PM

2. People of the world... Betsey Harriet Wolfson does not like popup windows
   please disable them on the double!!!

   Sounds like she is from static age maybe 1980 when they used hard copy's and huge cameras with Agfa paper maybe San Francisco... or L.A. am I wrong???

   Posted by: Oscar Wilde on May 1, 2004 09:52 AM