Re: [Epiphany] Popups blocking

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 00:16, Jens Knutson wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 01:17, Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> > I don't really know how often they are used for legitimate
> > things, but I do know of some important cases where you couldn't use a
> > service without allowing popups (e.g. where they ask you to select media
> > format or something for videos).
> 
> It's not *too* often that they're used for legitimate reasons, but those
> times when they are, it is indeed very important that they work.  
> 
> > Is it possible to somehow close popups when the window they are
> > associated with closes? Or something like that? Just talking out of my
> > arse here ;-)
> 
> This only solves half the problem, IMHO.  The other part of the problem
> with popups is having to move them out of the way or close them just to
> get to the page you were trying to look at in the first place, since the
> damn things tend to travel in herds, obscuring most of one's screen. 
> The annoyance factor is still going to be very high with a solution like
> that.

That's why I think you want to combine something that makes popups go
away (equivalent of memory management for popups :-) with something that
controls their location/position....not something that supresses them
altogether.

> > Another idea would be to have a "Popup Navigator" that contains little
> > thumbnailed snapshots of popup windows which can be "activated" by
> > clicking on them. If it were a little button or something activatable in
> > the status bar, it could possibly flash once when a new popup appeared.
> 
> Too weird a concept for most users, I'd guess.  I'm imagining Joe User
> giving a puzzled "WTF is a popup navigator, why are you making me learn
> this?  I just wanna kill popups!" look right about now.

It would have to be done very carefully... You would never see the word
"popup navigator" or any nonsense like that. I have no idea if its
possible to do it sufficiently non-obstrusively that it would be usable,
actually, just brain-storming ;-)

> I really think the Phoenix model is the closest to doing the correct
> thing.

The problem with the Phoenix model is I see many people sitting there
going "well I clicked the link, why am I not seeing the
video/next-page/britannica photo/whatever". While I approve of the
usability of supressing popups, the collateral damage of people having
to understand "blocking" / "unblocking" and that stuff to do essential
things is really high.

-Seth