A pop-up is a window or a frame containing information or a request for information, such as an email address. Pop-ups can be a harvesting process to gather email addresses for spamming, selling or other reasons not to our benefit. They are most often unwanted advertisements and sometimes contain pornographic comments or graphics. Others are invitations requesting your email address to receive more information. The homepage of some websites contain embedded ads; if our mouse pointer slides into their field, a pop-up immediately appears. The pop-up can be a new page, blocking or replacing, the webpage we are viewing or a small frame blocking part of the page we are viewing.

To stop unwanted pop-ups is not a big problem because there are many pop-up Blocker programs. Some browsers have built-in pop-up blockers, or an extension or an add-on to prevent unwanted Pop-ups. Internet Explorer and Firefox have ad-blockers to stop unwanted pop-ups. If, pop-ups are a problem we need to check and make certain our ad-blocker or pop-up blocker is "on". Click on the tools button and look for the pop-up blocker or ad-blocker feature, and click "on". Some toolbars such as Google, Yahoo and Equifax have pop-up blockers add-ons for their toolbars. After downloading a pop-up or ad-blocker feature, it necessary to open the feature and click the "on" button.

Pop-up blockers are part of a full security program such as Micro-Trend, Mcafee or Symantec Norton. Every computer owner ought to invest in a full security program to be safe on the Internet. Many people do not realize the importance and quality of security, which comes from paying extra money for full protection of their computer. They take an unnecessary risk by downloading free software, which does not offer full real time security or daily updates. The full security programs hire technicians who develop daily updates as they discover the newest threats of spyware, adware viruses, trojans and other dangers. The full service security programs send pop-ups with a warning and actions to take as we work online if some harmful element enters an open port or a virus strikes.

Sometimes our security program will send a pop-up with a warning such as, "You have opened a dangerous site, close your browser and do not attempt to open this site again". Others may come while we are downloading a program and contain a message such as, "A program is attempting to download to your computer," in response we click "Allow or Do not allow." Our security program is on the job protecting our computer from hackers who attempt to download something to our computer without our knowledge. Some pop-ups are good while others are just irritating and others are potentially harmful to our computer.