I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate
now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.
I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock
origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock
origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by
random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider
it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be
pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in
effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things
can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation
Robin Hood waylanders).
Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is,
if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate,
it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never
receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with
such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the
example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can
abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads,
but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking
that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin
was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy
ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such
as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer
systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important
to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks
pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this
decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?
Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.
A thing that an ordinary user does not want, but is presented on top of content that they do want, is not serving user desires.
Of course, it's serving the needs of the project, theoretically. (Organizational capture of organizational perpetuation at the expense of organizational goals are a common problem, but I don't have any knowledge or opinion of this case.)
Adopting the user-hostile behaviours of advertising and perpetual fundraising are not a great way to make users happy. But they work, I guess. At some cost.
Don't ask me, I voted by disabling JavaScript and running Firefox. I don't have these problems.
It's abuse. Sugar coating it will only empower the perpetrators. Is it the most inhumane thing possible? No, obviously not. But these sites are taking advantage of the fact that you're there to do something, learn something, get something done, etc and they have your eyeballs. What they're doing is intentional, distracting and getting worse.
I don't care what the commercial status of the site is that I'm visiting, you will not hijack my attention.
You're using a web browser built by a company whose primary income is advertising. What did you think would happen instead?
A lot of people have this weird idea that companies are their friends and would defend their interests despite large financial incentives to betray that trust.
I disagree with this idea. The current model (generally free content that is supported by advertisers) is not the only model that can exist. Yes the Internet would be vastly different if there were no ad revenue. But the Internet existed without ads before, and certainly could do so again. Services like Meta/X couldn't exist in that market, but would that be so bad?
Because they don't understand the rules of the game.
If you create something in a field that is so infinitely commoditized that there aren't even any paid options and thousands of competitors that would instantly jump at the chance to be a replacement just for popularity's sake, you are frankly deluded to expect anything in return for your work. Best you can expect is to have some influence over others through your direction of the project, which is something that you could actually sell and I'm sure they do. Just look at Zig.
Any donations they get are completely against any market common sense and just people's good will. Demanding anything is so hilariously out of touch with reality.
I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour (performance problems, BSOD, ribbons, clippies, Activation Keys, terrible networking protocols)? After we reached age 15 or so, we learned to politely hold back from saying "yeah we know, use a better OS"?
> I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
You're mixing "badly implemented operating system", "UX patterns I disagree with", "dark patterns pushed by corporate greed", and "Turns out you need money in order to pay developer salaries even in an open source project".
I'll be polite as well and not elaborate further...
It’s not Python asking for donations, it’s the Python Software Foundation. Which means donations won’t necessarily go to improving Python or running PyPI, but your money might end up funding a conference in Trumpistan, outreach for the world’s most popular programming language, or political activities.
> I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem
It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.
> I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.
I had to disable uBlock Origin to test this and... wow, what a load of bullshit. If anything, this kind of stuff makes me want to _not_ donate to that project. All projects I've donated to in the past were the ones which didn't bother me with these things.
I wonder now how many of these I've been missing because of uBlock Origin + DNS Blocking + JS disabled. Last time I tried a normie browser (my mom's), I had to install uBlock Origin there, because I just couldn't use it that way. I feel sorry for the majority of web users, who don't have any protections against popups and invasive advertisements.
KDE started doing a similar thing in 2024. They pop up a notification asking for donations once yearly. Whether you click "Donate" or "No Thanks" on the pop-up, it will go away until the next year. I don't mind them doing this, as it clearly works (see https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... and https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ ). Historically, contributions to KDE mainly came from companies/government agencies funding work on specific technologies/parts of the desktop, and volunteers working on their special interests. This meant there was a giant blind spot for work on areas that weren't relevant for corporations/governments and weren't fun to work on in someone's free time. All the small individual donations make it possible for KDE to act independently of these large companies/government bodies and hire its own developers to work on tasks that may not be commercially relevant or fun, but are important to the project.
Google own products have pop ups. Ad Sense automatic ads generates pop ups. I imagine this is hundreds on millions a month, there’s no way to justify shutting this down in their new “be evil profit at all cost” motto.
It's enshitification of the web. As time moves forward, the web becomes less usable and more about implementing dark patterns to squeeze a few bucks out of you. Anyone would have likely eventually made this decision. It's just a natural conclusion of capitalism.
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.
I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.
Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.
*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.
sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money
Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.
Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”
At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.
Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…
Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
My choice is uBlock Origin and enabling the Cookie Notices filter lists and other Annoyances filter lists (which block the Mobile app banners and such). Works pretty well.
Obviously using Firefox, since Chrome doesn't let me filter content my own computer renders locally these days...
Couldn’t agree more. Also FF user and Ublock Origin works great.
On mobile (iOS in my case) it’s not that easy though. I’m using safari with AdGuard which works for some annoyances, but by far not all.
The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait)
I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.
The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.
Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time.
Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
In theory with GDPR conforming websites it should be 1 click and that is "reject all" or "accept only essential" cookies and a website would truly only ever set essential cookies, and not something else that is non-essential to reading the content.
In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential, and the websites do not actually follow the law.
Mind, this is talking about the not rolled back version of GDPR, that I read they are planning to roll back somewhat and thereby destroy the good it was.
In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website. Like, who wants every idiot on the web to know one's address? Might as well not have a blog or website. There are websites which don't require it and you can sort of gray zone get around it, but that's already too much effort that inhibits a freely developing web. Instead people flock to abusive social media presences. Germany has managed to basically kill its blogging and web culture through this idiocy and thereby got rid of a lot of educational potential and skilled workforce.
Speaking for myself only, but I find it easier to click ‘back’ than waste time on my ‘consent’.
Lately, I’m asking some llm to fetch it and summarize, so the one sentence content that was expanded into a full page article goes back to its original form.
Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
It's so lazy and dumb. The wildest thing about it, is that they could mostly delay required cookies to the second contact, first interaction or at the time it's actually required. Raw first contact engagement can be tracked cookieless.
> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.
If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.
There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.
I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.
Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!
I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.
A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.
If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
Also:
Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
Recently, I helped a family member getting set up with e-newspaper of a local newspaper. The deal is to get paper newspaper at the weekend and e-newspaper on working days.
When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.
So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.
> If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.
I kinda see the opposite, all sites seem to be going to subscription models. Obviously it doesn't work because I'm not going to subscribe to every news site I see a link from on HN.
So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.
Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.
In the early 2000’s there was a porn site that completely covered you screen with porn pop-ups when you visited it. The funny joke back then was to opened it on school computer so that the poor teachers had to close them one by one (boot the PC if they were more savvy).
Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.
If there's going to be an LLM in my browser whether or not I ask for it, this is probably what it should be handling for me.
"Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.
Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas.
It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.
They were so much worse. They’d basically “corrupt” your system state. They were often self replicating and so you’d have to quit the whole browser to make it stop. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.
One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.
Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
Even assuming that we lose that particular battle, I can't understand why the browsers won't make their right-click menus orthogonal and offer an "open in this tab" option.
There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case.
The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.)
I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia.
If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.
Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.
It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?
I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years.
The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.
Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.
Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., not to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that.
You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues.
I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine.
It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives.
I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.
I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”
For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites.
When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.
What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter.
I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email?
Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop.
NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.
Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.
The cookies will still be correlated with each other, and your behavior will still be sent offsite for aggregation by ad identity companies, then linked back to your non-private browser behavior via IP, or browser fingerprinting, or any site you log into, etc.
It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies.
Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.
Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.
A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...
I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.
Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.
I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…
It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more.
It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes.
I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.
I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.
I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.
If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.
It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked.
I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
After 30 years I’m convinced that the web is nothing more than Nordstroms.
Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting.
Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits.
Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits.
Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions.
I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance.
We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed.
This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.
I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).
Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.
We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.
It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.
The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
"Only allow play of audio in response to user action."
Okay, cool, so there's a giant 'click' event handler on top of the whole page. When you click it I'm going to play a 250ms long sample of silence embedded as a data:// URL into the audio or video element.
Now I control the player and can do whatever I want.
Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.
Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.
What about what Claude or any LLM bot does with info it randomly finds online? Run local commands you didn’t ask for, visit sites you didn’t expect it to visit? Upload data and files you don’t ask it to upload?
Everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.
You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.
Soemtimes I dream of an LLM infused browser, which will first pull the HTML for a given URL, then filter out all the BS and just give you a clean readable version, without you ever seeing the original page.
Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.
I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it.
Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:
- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.
- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.
- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar
I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.
I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders).
Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?
> I consider this abuse of the visitor.
Why can't anything simply be "disliked" anymore?
I get you don't like it.
But abused?
Because there's a slide-in?
On a site run by volunteers?
For open source software you get for free?
That you freely choose to visit?
Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.
How about "user-hostile"?
A thing that an ordinary user does not want, but is presented on top of content that they do want, is not serving user desires.
Of course, it's serving the needs of the project, theoretically. (Organizational capture of organizational perpetuation at the expense of organizational goals are a common problem, but I don't have any knowledge or opinion of this case.)
Adopting the user-hostile behaviours of advertising and perpetual fundraising are not a great way to make users happy. But they work, I guess. At some cost.
Don't ask me, I voted by disabling JavaScript and running Firefox. I don't have these problems.
It's abuse. Sugar coating it will only empower the perpetrators. Is it the most inhumane thing possible? No, obviously not. But these sites are taking advantage of the fact that you're there to do something, learn something, get something done, etc and they have your eyeballs. What they're doing is intentional, distracting and getting worse.
I don't care what the commercial status of the site is that I'm visiting, you will not hijack my attention.
> I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.
To see it on python.org I had to enable JS (using noscript) AND disable uBlock Origin.
> then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
Use Firefox
Or use other chromium based browsers! Thorium still has working uBlock origin!
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> I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google
You're using a web browser built by a company whose primary income is advertising. What did you think would happen instead?
A lot of people have this weird idea that companies are their friends and would defend their interests despite large financial incentives to betray that trust.
I’m sure they’d love to include a blocker in Chrome that blocks all the competitive ad networks.
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"That's just how they make their money," is a common and terrible excuse.
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If you use a service, but never compensate the creators for it, how can you possibly reason they are immoral?
Not directly at OP, but just in general, the Internet needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask "are we actually the ones driving the problem?"
I disagree with this idea. The current model (generally free content that is supported by advertisers) is not the only model that can exist. Yes the Internet would be vastly different if there were no ad revenue. But the Internet existed without ads before, and certainly could do so again. Services like Meta/X couldn't exist in that market, but would that be so bad?
Free service with strings attached does sound like a "some day - and that day may never come - I will call upon you"[0] type of bargain.
[0] https://youtu.be/HTTxJRAs-uA?t=48
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Because they don't understand the rules of the game.
If you create something in a field that is so infinitely commoditized that there aren't even any paid options and thousands of competitors that would instantly jump at the chance to be a replacement just for popularity's sake, you are frankly deluded to expect anything in return for your work. Best you can expect is to have some influence over others through your direction of the project, which is something that you could actually sell and I'm sure they do. Just look at Zig.
Any donations they get are completely against any market common sense and just people's good will. Demanding anything is so hilariously out of touch with reality.
I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour (performance problems, BSOD, ribbons, clippies, Activation Keys, terrible networking protocols)? After we reached age 15 or so, we learned to politely hold back from saying "yeah we know, use a better OS"?
This feels very similar. I'll be polite. :)
> I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
You're mixing "badly implemented operating system", "UX patterns I disagree with", "dark patterns pushed by corporate greed", and "Turns out you need money in order to pay developer salaries even in an open source project".
I'll be polite as well and not elaborate further...
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I haven't used chrome in years.I can't even imagine the user experience you're describing. Just use FF.
You think Python is being malicious for asking for donations when they give away so much for free?
Had you already paid for it ahead of time?
Personally I wouldn't mind the ask, it's the pop-up that covers content that I mind.
No, the issue is the intrusive way of asking.
are the donations being distributed among the actual contributors, or do they largely go towards funding DEI initiatives? :)
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It’s not Python asking for donations, it’s the Python Software Foundation. Which means donations won’t necessarily go to improving Python or running PyPI, but your money might end up funding a conference in Trumpistan, outreach for the world’s most popular programming language, or political activities.
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> I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem
It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.
Short-term thinking is how hegemonies end.
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I had to disable uBlock Origin to test this and... wow, what a load of bullshit. If anything, this kind of stuff makes me want to _not_ donate to that project. All projects I've donated to in the past were the ones which didn't bother me with these things.
I wonder now how many of these I've been missing because of uBlock Origin + DNS Blocking + JS disabled. Last time I tried a normie browser (my mom's), I had to install uBlock Origin there, because I just couldn't use it that way. I feel sorry for the majority of web users, who don't have any protections against popups and invasive advertisements.
For that matter the GNOME desktop asked me for money the other day
KDE started doing a similar thing in 2024. They pop up a notification asking for donations once yearly. Whether you click "Donate" or "No Thanks" on the pop-up, it will go away until the next year. I don't mind them doing this, as it clearly works (see https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... and https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ ). Historically, contributions to KDE mainly came from companies/government agencies funding work on specific technologies/parts of the desktop, and volunteers working on their special interests. This meant there was a giant blind spot for work on areas that weren't relevant for corporations/governments and weren't fun to work on in someone's free time. All the small individual donations make it possible for KDE to act independently of these large companies/government bodies and hire its own developers to work on tasks that may not be commercially relevant or fun, but are important to the project.
Google own products have pop ups. Ad Sense automatic ads generates pop ups. I imagine this is hundreds on millions a month, there’s no way to justify shutting this down in their new “be evil profit at all cost” motto.
"did"? still does.
Just don't use chrome.
It's enshitification of the web. As time moves forward, the web becomes less usable and more about implementing dark patterns to squeeze a few bucks out of you. Anyone would have likely eventually made this decision. It's just a natural conclusion of capitalism.
uBlock Origin it's very alive and working fine in Firefox and forks of it.
> Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin.
Advertising company's browser makes it hard to block ads. Film at 11.
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.
I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.
Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.
*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.
sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money
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That is a decent feature.
Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.
DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.
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Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
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What I've seen lead to success:
* Arrogance
* Overconfidence
* Schmoozing with the right people
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
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Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.
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Similar people who used animated banners in '00s.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
There are other approaches than ads.
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
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It's not just transaction fees, since Patreon succeeds while Flattr (2.0) failed.
I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.
1. Pop up demanding I make a choice about their cookies.
2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.
3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.
Every. fucking. site.
The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.
Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.
Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”
For the cookies you have the Consent-O-Matic plugin. For the rest Ublock Origin is pretty effective with the optional Annoyances lists switched on.
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For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.
I detest newsletter modals.
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You forgot to sub to push.
It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.
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> Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.
At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
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Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.
The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.
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The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.
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Me too!
I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
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the vast majority of web users arent technical like HN readers. especially boomers, they actively solicit ad's to tell them what to buy.
If it takes an ad for someone to buy something, chances are they shouldn’t buy anything.
No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.
Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…
Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
> My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…
My choice is uBlock Origin and enabling the Cookie Notices filter lists and other Annoyances filter lists (which block the Mobile app banners and such). Works pretty well.
Obviously using Firefox, since Chrome doesn't let me filter content my own computer renders locally these days...
Couldn’t agree more. Also FF user and Ublock Origin works great. On mobile (iOS in my case) it’s not that easy though. I’m using safari with AdGuard which works for some annoyances, but by far not all.
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On iOS, Adguard does a decent job. It's the only way I would ever use the internet.
I also supplement it with the "Web Archives" extension to access paywalled and login-walled articles.
I've enjoyed https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic/ it fills out cookie banner automatically according to your preferences.
Obviously alongside ublock origin for the rest of the minefields
The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait)
I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.
The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.
Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time.
Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
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In theory with GDPR conforming websites it should be 1 click and that is "reject all" or "accept only essential" cookies and a website would truly only ever set essential cookies, and not something else that is non-essential to reading the content.
In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential, and the websites do not actually follow the law.
Mind, this is talking about the not rolled back version of GDPR, that I read they are planning to roll back somewhat and thereby destroy the good it was.
In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website. Like, who wants every idiot on the web to know one's address? Might as well not have a blog or website. There are websites which don't require it and you can sort of gray zone get around it, but that's already too much effort that inhibits a freely developing web. Instead people flock to abusive social media presences. Germany has managed to basically kill its blogging and web culture through this idiocy and thereby got rid of a lot of educational potential and skilled workforce.
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Speaking for myself only, but I find it easier to click ‘back’ than waste time on my ‘consent’.
Lately, I’m asking some llm to fetch it and summarize, so the one sentence content that was expanded into a full page article goes back to its original form.
I’ve noticed some LLMs lately aren’t pulling the page and try guessing the content from URL SEO.
Brave made this more bearable for me, by blocking cookie banners by default.
Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
It's so lazy and dumb. The wildest thing about it, is that they could mostly delay required cookies to the second contact, first interaction or at the time it's actually required. Raw first contact engagement can be tracked cookieless.
> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
> Ads are content too, you know?
Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.
It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.
Sad times.
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If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.
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The content was better when it was posted by hobbyists for free than it is now posted by people trying to make money off of it. So... fuck 'em.
> Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
I'm fine with that. An ad-laden site with ads I cannot block won't have me as a visitor anyway, so I'm not really going to notice if they are gone.
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Ads do not absolutely have to be delivered via pop ups or modals.
If the content is so worthless that people will not voluntarily pay for it, then this outcome would be no great tragedy.
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I was fine with ads when they were a text AdSense banner.
Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.
I would care if they were at all capable of respecting people who allow ads.
I'd be fine with a whole web free of revenue.
There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.
> Ads are content too, you know?
I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.
Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!
I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.
A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.
If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
Oh hi, I noticed you closed the live video window I opened up, let me open that up again for you.
Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again.
Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.
Also: Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
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You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
They don't care about return visitors or "loyal viewers."
It's a shotgun strategy. Every once in a while a story will hit. So they maximize value for the rarest event.
Recently, I helped a family member getting set up with e-newspaper of a local newspaper. The deal is to get paper newspaper at the weekend and e-newspaper on working days.
When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.
So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.
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> If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.
I kinda see the opposite, all sites seem to be going to subscription models. Obviously it doesn't work because I'm not going to subscribe to every news site I see a link from on HN.
So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.
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Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.
In the early 2000’s there was a porn site that completely covered you screen with porn pop-ups when you visited it. The funny joke back then was to opened it on school computer so that the poor teachers had to close them one by one (boot the PC if they were more savvy).
Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.
GNAA Last Measure? It did a little bit more than just opening a bunch of windows and yelling "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porn" :)
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If there's going to be an LLM in my browser whether or not I ask for it, this is probably what it should be handling for me.
"Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.
Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas.
It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
In other words: browsers should just implement uBlock Origin by default.
Firefox does already have some tracker blocking built in, though it would be fantastic to import arbitrary filter lists.
Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.
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This is the equivalent of
"Lawmakers should legally set rents to $0, so we can all live for free"
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This is what brave does. It's implement without needing an extension, so Manifest V2/V3 etc doesn't matter one bit.
So, Brave.
> Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever
The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.
They were so much worse. They’d basically “corrupt” your system state. They were often self replicating and so you’d have to quit the whole browser to make it stop. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.
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>sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from
I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.
Porn and privacy sites. Especially the latter still do it a LOT and they will just block you if you block the popups.
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One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.
Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
Even assuming that we lose that particular battle, I can't understand why the browsers won't make their right-click menus orthogonal and offer an "open in this tab" option.
There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case.
The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.)
I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia.
If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.
Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.
The solution may just have to be technological literacy.
It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?
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I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years.
The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.
On uBlock Origin settings > Filter lists > Annoyances
Check all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA
Yup this works really well.
Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
This is easily solved by closing the tab and never returning
Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.
Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., not to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that.
You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues.
I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine.
It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives.
I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.
I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”
For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites.
When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.
What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email?
Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop.
It's all so tiresome.
NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.
Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.
Adblock won't block the "subscribe for 2 free articles" popups.
Of course it will. At least the second time, after you tell it that '.popup-subscribe-modal' should never be seen again.
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Nor will pop-up blocking I'm afraid.
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_continue without supporting_ is a button i like to press
As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.
Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
> It is definitely a hard problem to distinguish between “legitimate” pop-ups and advertising pop-ups.
I note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.
Turning off JS goes a long way towards avoiding most of the ad/popup problem. I just turn it off for bad sites, keep it on for most.
Ironically, they do still block the actual pop-up window my bank tries to spawn during 2fac sign-in
All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on
The bigest anoyance nowadays (in the EU at least) is rather the cookie policy agreement. "View the list of our 258 partners", etc.
I find the Consent-O-Matic extension pretty good in dealing with that.
I refuse to engage with EU cookie banners, even programmatically.
Use private mode browsing, click the easy option of allow all, and rejoice that cookies are cleared when you close the tab.
The cookies will still be correlated with each other, and your behavior will still be sent offsite for aggregation by ad identity companies, then linked back to your non-private browser behavior via IP, or browser fingerprinting, or any site you log into, etc.
It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies.
Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.
Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
We have that (first DoNotTrack, now Global Privacy Control). Turns out bad karma doesn't really affect website behaviour.
(GPC has some legal teeth though, and might get more, so perhaps that will help.)
i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.
Isn't there extension's that block this?
A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...
I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.
Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.
I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…
It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more.
It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.
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It's just nihilism, we can put the urls on dht when we are ready.
Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes.
I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.
I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.
I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
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If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.
If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.
It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
Fyi, ublock is on iOS now
But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked.
I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
Install the dns4eu configuration profile with adblocking:
https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH
... and block all of it on a system level beneath Safari.
Reader view works pretty nicely against most modal annoyances.
After 30 years I’m convinced that the web is nothing more than Nordstroms.
Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting.
Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits. Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits. Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions.
I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance.
We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed.
This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.
I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
That's because the biggest ad selling companies make or fund the web browsers.
Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).
easyist annoyances filter should take care of a lot of these.
My method when such a pop-up occurs: I'll vote with my feet and immediately close the sites windows to reward them (at lest 95% of the time)
Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.
We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.
It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.
Lite's really not that bad. I agree you'd rather ff and the full ublock but it's still a vastly better experience
The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
Only allow dom/css changes in response to user action.
"Click here to prove you're human"
Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.
"Only allow play of audio in response to user action."
Okay, cool, so there's a giant 'click' event handler on top of the whole page. When you click it I'm going to play a 250ms long sample of silence embedded as a data:// URL into the audio or video element.
Now I control the player and can do whatever I want.
You've inconvenienced me for 15 minutes.
Like... scrolling down the page?
Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
Right on the money. This should be the top comment IMO, and the fact that it isn't says a lot about modern HN...
Either Firefox + Ublock Origin or Brave Browser.
Case solved.
Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.
Isn't the problem that if everybody started using it most Web sites couldn't keep existing?
Most web sites are crap, honestly.
Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
Their problem, not mine.
maybe the intro etc of absurd.org could somehow happen again. a very artsy artefact of a website that utilised popups (and Java) at certain points
https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...
UBlock origin is pretty good at blocking those in-page popups though. You do have to add the optional Annoyances blocklists for that though.
They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.
These models will start serving ads inline with results soon. All of the major players in this technology are still ad companies
Or worse, be [secretly] biased towards sponsored answers/solutions. There's a reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated.
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You’re missing the /s right?
What about what Claude or any LLM bot does with info it randomly finds online? Run local commands you didn’t ask for, visit sites you didn’t expect it to visit? Upload data and files you don’t ask it to upload?
If you don’t know what I mean, here is a cool talk for you to watch https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-ai-agent-ai-spy
Everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.
I mean, don’t give your “search the web and tell me what it says” bot access to local files or commands.
You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.
Seriously?
When I asked Claude "AI" for today's news, it gave me only news from days ago.
Asking an AI for news is like asking your friend to eat junk food for you.
How much time until websites start rendering everything to <canvas>?
The author seems to be confusing third party ad pop-ups with promotional modals from websites.
The author seems to think there's no practical difference to the user.
Soemtimes I dream of an LLM infused browser, which will first pull the HTML for a given URL, then filter out all the BS and just give you a clean readable version, without you ever seeing the original page.
Anything so heavily abused deserves to default to off. But good luck convincing Firefox to do that, let alone the others.
Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird.
Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.
Popups and Cloudflare stepping in.
Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.
I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
i even have popup blocker extension in ff and it's not working well at all.
I noticed the same on a site I have been reading for over 30 years. I am about to abandon that site.
Hope this issue is solved.
Try disabling JS for that site.
I use noscript, if I disable the site itself, it is unreadable :)
People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it.
Be better.
Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:
- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.
- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.
- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar