Well, if you have a decent pop-up blocker, it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. The best ones can be configured to only block pop-ups that appeared without you clicking a link, while even the simplest will generally allow pop-ups through temporarily if you hold down the Alt or Ctrl key while you click.

However, the fact that many pop-up blockers deactivate themselves when you click has recently been exploited by crafty pop-up companies, who have altered their scripts to launch a pop-up when you click somewhere within a page, such as on a scroll bar.

Good pop-up blockers can also be configured on a case-by-case basis – allow no pop-ups from one site, but allow all the pop-ups from another. This allows you to make a ‘whitelist’ of ad-free sites you visit often and want to accept pop-ups from, and a ‘blacklist’ of sites that are using devious pop-up techniques and should be blocked from opening pop-ups entirely.

Ultimately, however, the proliferation of pop-up blockers is gradually killing pop-ups altogether, both for advertising and for non-commercial uses – after all, what’s the point in displaying something that most people will never see? In the advertising arms race, the pop-up battle has more-or-less been won, and the advertisers are moving on to new, even more annoying ads.

One of the most popular options for intrusive ads at the moment is known as the ‘slider’ – it’s an image, often a Flash animation, that slides across the page and stops in the middle. Much like pop-ups, they obscure the text behind it, but they are much harder to close or block. If you want to defeat these ads, you have to bring out the heavy artillery.