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Comment by techtalsky | Hacker News Reader

You know, the age of ACTUAL pop-up windows really sucked, and it was amazing when browsers rendered them largely obsolete by limiting how websites could launch another window but at least all of those had the X in the SAME EXACT PLACE.

The new crop of lightboxed modal popups that are now ubiquitous are 100 times worse since they:

- are modal

- often work poorly on mobile

- have as many different dismiss mechanisms as there are popups

- web marketers love them

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The crucial usability difference is that lightbox style "popups" are all gone instantly when you close the page/tab.

I saw a particularly impressive one the other day which watched for mouse events on document.body, and when your mouse left the page in the "up" direction, it triggered a "Wait! Don't switch tabs! Check out this offer we have for you!" popup.

Those are called "exit intent" popups. The idea is this: If the person is about to close the page anyway, why not take a shot at offering them something? There's nothing to lose.

Except getting your site on a junkware blacklist.

Sounds nice. Just yesterday I saw another version of not too intrusive popup - it came after about 20 seconds at the bottom right, not obscuring the content, but noticable (some animation, don't remember exactly), and in the popup the headline was "Hey, at least it's not centered" or something like that. I actually smiled at that, so it got a positive initial impression. I didn't sign up because I wasn't that interested in the content of the site, but still nicely done.

They are not worse. They're totally self-contained. Do you not remember trying to chase down multiple pop-up windows which themselves would spawn more pop-up windows when you went to close them? In the absolute worst case with modals, you can just hit back or close the tab.

I really wish there was a way to globally disable all lightboxes without having to disable JavaScript entirely.

Maybe a Machine Learning model to prevent scripts from executing if the classifier indicates it will spawn a lightbox...

Love this idea. Would like to add that I'd love to block any fixed topnav that stays on the screen as you scroll down.

I, too, wish there were a feature that would break Web applications that use modals for marginal benefit.

Something as simple as checking that nothing dynamic blocks too much text would detect most of them currently.

But it quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse game.

That would stop any drop-down menu navigation bars from working though.

I hate when they have an |X| in the corner to close it, but that |X| is just part of the popup, so it takes you to the other page, as though you wanted to click the ad.

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