Pop-up and banner advertisements are the bane of Web surfers everywhere. Pop-up ads will appear over the top of a web page, under the web page, and the floating over the web page. A banner ad is a rectangular or square box place directly on the web page that links to the advertiser's product page. Many commercial website sell ad space much like magazines, newspapers or television stations. The technology used to create ads is evolving to the point that simply moving your cursor over an advertisement can trigger the link to the advertiser product page.

Stopping invasive advertising can be done through your Web browser. Many browsers have settings that allow you to block pop-up and pop-under ads. They are:

Many personal firewalls incorporate pop-up blocking tools such as:

There are a number of standalone pop-up blockers such as:
AdsGone (http://www.adsgone.com/); Zero Popup (http://www.popup-killer.info/zero-popup/); Pop-Up Defender (http://www.synergeticsoft.com/); PopUpCop (http://www.popupcop.com/?src=ES); Pop-Up Stopper (http://www.panicware.com/).

When selecting an ad filter, review the software specifications to insure that the filter will work with your particular browsing program (e.g., Internet Explorer, Netscape, AOL, etc.) and operating system (e.g., Windows XP or Macintosh OS).

Pop-up blocker technology can eliminate annoying advertisement but there are some problems you may encounter. The technology used to create a pop-up advertisement is also employed in a useful way by many website developers. Some help and tutorial information links can be seen as a pop-up window by the filtering software and it will block access to these information pages. Most filtering programs have the ability to temporarily turn off the blocker that will allow access to requested information pages.

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