Floaters are the New Pop-Ups 613
windowpain writes "A prior Slashdot article discussed the ever-increasing ability of pop-up ads to break through adblocking software. Now the New York Times (registration required) is reporting that pop-ups are pooped out, replaced by those annoying "floaters" that are even more resistant to conventional pop-up blocking software. From the article: 'Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated. In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.'"
Floaters are not evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with popups is that clicking the back button was not enough, one had to clean up the mess -- sometimes a mess that would keep respawning itself. Floaters look superficially similar to popups, but floaters are completely contained within the window. That makes them just another (usually bad) design feature.
"Remove this object" (Score:5, Insightful)
Even more annoying ... (Score:5, Insightful)
CSS + Javascript (Score:5, Insightful)
Ergo; the user can simply dissallow CSS allowing flying elements ("float"-ing is a different thing, you see).
There needs to be a definite shift from the web-site having "control" unless the browser is patched to snatch it back, towards the web-page being permitted to do its thing within certain boundaries (boundaries that the user is in control of).
The rush to provide "web applications" runs contary to this; web pages are DATA, not programs and the further we go from that state, the more invasive mal-intentioned pages can be (example; ActiveX)
Re:Hey! (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you prefer to have everything like NYTimes.com instead? There's only so much BugMeNot can handle.
Re:Hey! (Score:2, Insightful)
Advertisers and, more importantly, the people who want a return on the investment they have made on their web site. If you don't like popovers vote with your mouse and don't visit those sites.
Sollution. (Score:4, Insightful)
This will get worse (Score:3, Insightful)
The more people that use firefox the more things like this will pop up, so we'll end up playing catch up over and over (and lets face it, the release yesterday proved how bad the update system is right now) untill people get sick of it and use a new browser which fixs this.
Now watch the post get 12 million replies saying "Yea like Usenet and Windows! Firefox is going to die hahahaha".
Re:Hey! (Score:3, Insightful)
One word: Subscriptions. I have subscriptions for the news outlets I rely on for my information (including Slashdot).
Who does this? Why do they do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
These "floaters" remind me of that childish thing where someone leaps around thrusting their hands in front of your face going, "Not touching! Can't get mad!" Oh, yeah. That behaviour is really going to make me want to buy your product.
Since "floater" is (in England, anyway) slang for a turd that can't be flushed away, the name is at least appropriate.
Re:Raise your hands (Score:2, Insightful)
--
they don't. they do what it takes to sell sell sell. They do it because it puts money in their pocket, and pays for the stuff you are trying to read. As long as the media owners allow them to do it, and the technology is there to exploit, they will exploit all of it. The best possible way for everyone to fight this stuff is to *never* click on it.
Then, as in 1999-2001 advertisers will realize that internet marketing is crap, and the bubble will burst again, which incidentally will cause the media owners to not be able to make money, and have to shut down, or cut back on the content they provide.
If you want the good, you have to take the bad. Content costs money, a lot of it. If you can't pay people to write it, where do you think it will come from?
Those annoying ads, pay for the content behind them. If you don't like the ads, live without the content.
They annoy me as much as the next guy, but they are there because they have to be and I understand that. Unfortunately money makes the world go round, not idealism.
Re:Hey! (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn it all to hell, TEXT ADS! In a space on the side of the screen! Google figured this out years ago, how long is it going to take for the penny to drop with the rest of these bozos? How hard is it to understand that maximizing annoyances your potential customer base is not good for business?
Seriously. Why does this have to be so difficult? The fact that people are developping countermeasures to your advertising should be lighting a bulb, however dim, somewhere in your mind. What could it mean? Whatever could it mean?
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate pop-ups and floaters as much as the next guy but c'mon, you're on their website! It's not like they're sticking their ads on every website you visit withotut he site's approval. If you don't like their business model, do not visit the sites. simple.
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even more annoying ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike all these pop-ups and pop-unders and "floaters" and the like, if you click on the link to a page and are served a different page instead, then it's completely out of your control, and there's nothing at all that your browser can do about it. Disabling javascript or whatever won't help - you asked for a page, you got served a page, and the fact that the content isn't what you were expecting is impossible to detect, short of AI in the browser, or some sort of distributed checksum or Bayesian filter, like with spam.
Essentially it becomes like TV, where you have no control over when the ad breaks are inserted. With TV the solution is to record it, and then fast forward or skip the ads, but recording TV is a lot easier than fetching all the pages for a web article - a tv "stream" is linear, whereas with a website, each page can link to multiple other pages, so you'd have to crawl the whole site or something.
Mod me down if you want but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that popups are bad because they grab your screen real estate, they go outside the content provider space into your personal space.
But floaters do not use any of your personal space. When you visit a website, you are giving the content provider some space on your screen. In return it provides you with content of interest. If in addition, in the same space you are allowing him to use, it provides ads, just live with it.
And if you don't like the way he serve ads, then just leave the site.
If a web site become too anoying, I either complain to the site operator or just leave the site and not return to it anymore.
We don't need to escalade the arm race against ads... We already have way to disable ads images ans popups. We also have a way of saying to content provider that the way they display ads annoys us. I believe that's more than enough!
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Menus and dialogs etc are tricky though, as the browser cant detect when the user has requested it or not, and in some cases you may want it even when you don't manually request it.
Perhaps instead would be a way where you could hold ctrl and click a layer and it would disappear. Too many times Ive seen ads with the little 'x' to close button hidden away, one of these days the ads will start not bothering to even have close buttons. Or the close buttons will count as a click.
I think theres an extension for Firefox that lets you dismiss elements like this already actually.
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
That is definitely a better solution. You still have to see the ad initially, but it at least returns control to the user. I'm all about user-control when it comes to the web. Control of your browser and your computer should rest with *you*, not some random, untrusted site on the public internet.
Re:CSS + Javascript (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice neo-Luddite philosophy. Throughout the history of computing and technology in general, there have been arguments like this. "X is made to do y and only y" and so forth. Well, like it or not, we are finally getting the infrastructure to build cross-platform applications using the web browser and people are using it. I agree that the user should be able to assert a level of control over this technology, but we shouldn't hold the technology back until that happens. The problems imposed by technology typically get worse before they get better, but they do get better.
Just avoid these sites (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who Clicks On These? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your perception of "minimum quality you'll accept" has been influenced by marketing. That "5 star test" result is marketing. Honda having plants in the US is partly marketing... I could continue, but maybe that's unnecessary...
Of course some people are less influenced by ads and other marketing than others, but saying you're absolutely sure you're immune is living in denial.
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Not As Annoying as Pop-Up Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
By forcing advertisers to use this type of in-window advertising, I believe pop-up blockers have accomplished their mission and put the control over the browsing experience back in the user's hands. You can now just hit back and forget about visiting the site if you decide the content isn't worth dealing with the forest of floaters.
I believe that web site designers have a legitimate right to control the look and feel of their page, as long as they stay within the expected bounds given to them by the user. The use of floaters keeps them within this expected window. If a site decides to use these floaters and it annoys the users enough not to look at their content, then it is up to the users to go to alternate sources and the designers to realize their site is horrible when their visitors never bother wading through the floaters to see the content. This is an open internet after all, if you don't want to go through the floaters it is now easy to hit back and get your data from another source by selecting another search result, an alternate link, etc.
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do we even need drop-down menus on websites? Whatever happened to decently laid out sites that didn't contact the server every 10 seconds to see if there was an update? Web-forums with private messages? Let them notify me of a new message when I request a new page. Real-time dynamic content does not belong in a browser window.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned here, but I don't see "the web" as something I want to turn into application software. Not over HTTP. Leave my HTTP alone, let me browse through information, maybe hit some server-side app here and there for quasi-dynamic content. Enough with the client-side stuff. The only thing I can even see running client side is a validation script that just checks to see values are entered into a form. Not that they are right (other than format, like ###-###-#### for a US phone #). Other than that, keep it on your damn server.
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rate of change correlation (Score:3, Insightful)
But the big bonus is just by not installing Flash, at least half of ads don't load -- in particular, the most obnoxious ones.
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm just as much of a hippie as the next guy, but I'm not sure that "monopolism" is the word you're looking for. A true monopoly has no competitors, which means it has no reason to advertise.
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The next level of blocking (Score:5, Insightful)
First, we need to get Flash under user control. This may require implementing an open-source Flash player, or beating hard on Macromedia. Flash animations need to respond to a "block all images from this site" right-click. All animations should come up static, dimmed, and silent, requiring user action to activate them. This keeps the annoyance level down.
Then we need to make page ownership hierarchical. If a page opens another window, the new window is considered a child of the parent window. When the parent window closes, so must the child.
Further, child windows should be restricted to the area of the parent window. They must be in front of the parent, and they must have some minimal overlap. (Restricting them to the parent window frame is probably too restrictive, but requiring some overlap means they can't move freely around the screen.)
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Files should go over FTP. Hands down. That's what FTP is there for. Images in a web page? I can see a legitimate use there. Static content. Animated GIFs are annoying, yes, but I can get around them. Images are easy to disable.
DHTML, to me, is more than just text. I would almost call it a virus. (This is not intended to point fingers at those of you who use DHTML. I'm sure you write decent code that isn't causing me problems. I still don't like it.) It quit being "text" when it became code. Its still in text format, sure. It also is code that is being executed on my system that I didn't authorize to run. I didn't install it. I didn't sign an agreement. And I sure as hell don't want to run most of it, because it serves no purpose other than to make the page slower.
I realize /. uses Javascript. I can't say I approve, but I still come here because I enjoy the /. experience. Was my experience enhanced by the Javascript? No. Could this page work just as well as static HTML that backends form submissions off a server-side app? Yes. Would I prefer that? Hells yeah.
I just don't see a legitimate reason to need client-side scripting. At all. Advertising? A linked image or text works just fine. Blocking my right-click access? Bullshit. Menus? What's wrong with the menu on the left side of /.? It's easy to naviage. Most people I know who are basic PC users find menus in apps confusing. "Why is this here? Shouldn't it be over there?" I'm not against casual users, I just don't see what the point is of having this. It is unnecessary.
Of course, at this point I've realized that trying to explain my reasoning/position has become difficult, probably due to my poor response earlier in the thread. So I'm going to let this die after this post.
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, turning off javascript is not necessarily sufficient, because the site can just use CSS to place the ad in your way and javascript to remove it, and javascript also has uses which don't involve messing up the page.
Re:According to this Ad Executive, YOU're a THIEF! (Score:2, Insightful)
I am surprised I am not in jail yet! Of course, they are accusing me of being of thief while I am engaging in perfectly legal activities.
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a tired response. Nothing you can do about new sites you've never been to. You get annoyed when a popover shows up.
When you've been reading a site for years with interesting content and some new PHB ads popovers to the site you are going to have to find a way to block the popover less you be annoyed.
I'm sorry, but unplugging the interent and shutting it all down and walking away is a weak response to a new problem that needs to get licked.
The issue deserves attention.
The Human Front (Score:3, Insightful)
We've written spam filters that block spam. This fueled an even bigger arms race between spam senders and spam deleters.
Are we going to do the same with 'floaters'? I'm not sure they're going to be as easy to block, since they are essentially a part of the page content.
I think it's time we started moving away from technological approaches that lead to arms races, where we just end up with even more irritating spam (misspelled, randomly spaced) and still have popups (they just use nasty tricks in JavaScript).
How about we move to a new approach? I've just naturally done this for a while. When I go to your site, and can't see it because some huge thing starts floating across the screen, I go to another site. I'm not going to try to figure out how to close the thing. I'm not going to wait for it to go away. I'm going to leave your site. And if it happens enough, I'm eventually going to stop going to your site, since I can't ever see it.
If more people simply refused to put up with this crap, maybe we wouldn't have problems. They might be making more money off these irritating ads, but the increased cost per ad, times the 0 visitors they'd get, wouldn't equal what they got with less annoying ads.
Technology might buy us some time. But I think it's time we looked to something other than technological hacks to solve this sort of problem.
Re:Effective marketting through pain (Score:3, Insightful)
When I went to visit Japan, I learned QUICKLY what our zoning and sign laws are for. How would you like to be awakend each weekend morning to the sound of people screaming in the streets using amplified speakers strapped to their vehicles? It was surreal.
Re:According to this Ad Executive, YOU're a THIEF! (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they'll advertise more. They'll just offer less compensation to those who carry it to offset the "ad shrinkage" (presuming they don't already only advertise based on performance click-through).
This is already happening with AdWords - Adwords were a pretty fine way for small, one man shops to earn a bit of income with some barely intrusive ads. Now with clickbots inevitably either the small guy will be cut out, or the payment per click will be dramatically reduced as a "fraud surcharge".
Re:Who Clicks On These? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can honestly say any of them would happily double click a landmine just to see what happens.
Whaddaya know, a problem and a solution all rolled into one :).