Hacker News Reader

It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.

View on HN

Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).

Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.

And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.

Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup.

Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com