Popup Blocking is important for a variety of reasons. First of all, it is ANNOYING! Pages just popup whenever they feel like it, they clutter your screen, distract you, and cause you to misclick on things. They are always trying to take you to a new page, or collect your personal information, for what is most of the time a bogus offer. You need to have popup blocking setup on your computer to keep your sanity sometimes. This page will reveal what is really going on with popups and how best to stop them.

Art of Popups

A website will generally popup a new window if it is trying to get your attention. It will have a window appear in the center of your screen where you have to look at it before you do anything else. It is mostly used for advertising, and that is annoying enough. But sometimes it is used to get around certain defenses and even to infect your computer with spyware. If stopping aggrevating ads isn't enough reason to block popups, then security reasons should be. You should always have full control over what page appears on your computer. Popups are getting more and more advanced as time goes one. Everytime there is a new method for popup blocking, there is a new way to get around it. So one method is rarely ever enough.

Popup Blocking

It's hard to know which popup blocker to use. They all claim to be the best, and they claim to be all that you need. The truth is that no one popup blocker is 100% effective. But that doesn't mean that there isn't an easy setup that will stop the popups.

Suggested Pop Up Blocking Method

We recommend that you have a setup that has a line of defenses. Your first line of defense should of course be your Web Browser. Your browser is what reads and interprets web pages and that is where the popups originate. So if you have a secure and reliable web browser, you will have a healthy first line of defense. Next, you should have a Toolbar attached and installed to your web browser. A good toolbar will be a second line of defense against annoying popups. It should catch most everything that your web browser will miss. Finally, if you still are getting aggrevating popups, then we recommend that you install a 3rd party program that will monitor your computer for anything untoward that will get past your other lines of defense. We have review the top free popup blockers. Check them out.

Once you have this setup, you should give it a test run. Below you will find a link to test pages that we have setup that will run your defense through the paces and see just how secure that you are. First try the basic test to see if you are good to go with basic popup blocking. Then, if you are feeling lucky, try out our advanced popup blocking test page. This will throw every kind of advanced popup at you, all at once! If you can stop 90% + of these popups, you shouldn't have any problems. Our main test page can be found here: Popup Test

Final Reminders

This page should have given you a complete understanding of what a popup really is and how best to counter-act it. Remember that a layered defense system is the best choice because no one method is perfect. You should also be aware that sometimes you want a window to popup, so just be aware of what you are trying to do, and focus only on blocking the annoying popup ads that just clutter your screen and show you things that you are not interested in.