Ask HN:Pop-ups, previews, help bubbles, etc.

Quite simply all this popup stuff drives me insane. I am just trying to read or highlight for searching and boom, magically a popup appears. Often it will not even have a close button on it and wants to hang around until some arbitrary time out occurs, blocking what I am trying to read. I typically use the mouse to keep my place and often will rollover what I expect to be a link so I can see where it goes according to the status bar, where nothing appears since it's triggering a popup of some sort which is there to annoy me when I look back to where I left the mouse. At first it was just ads, which is irritating but not unexpected, and I just avoid those sites. However now we have these supposedly helpful ones that give us a preview window of the link. This just destroys the user experience for me and makes me never want to return to your page. Am I alone in my thinking here or is this the future of web design? I don't even want to use Ebay anymore because of this.