Not necessarily. There are methods of advertising that don't make spectacles of themselves. This user has responded to sites that insist on bombarding her with pop-up ads or else, by choosing 'or else.' I avoid About.com sites precisely because they wallow in pop-ups that appear to slow browsers equipped with blockers. Similar sites also get shown to the door.

An estimated 20 to 25 percent of Internet users are believed to enable pop-up blockers. The proportion has doubled in just one year. I suspect more surfers would employ the option if they were aware of its existence and/or how to use it. The lack of awareness is likely to change.

"In the year and half since EarthLink offered blocking software, one million of its five million customers have installed it. AOL added pop-up blocking to its software in 2002. Google added a blocker to its toolbar, a small program that adds some features to Internet Explorer. Yahoo, more recently, added a similar feature to its toolbar. And Microsoft's MSN just added a pop-up blocker to its most recent software.

The biggest potential impact will come this summer when Microsoft releases its Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which will add a pop-up blocker and many other features to Internet Explorer. For now, Microsoft says Internet Explorer will not block pop-ups unless users enable the feature."

Some advertisers and web site owners are responding to the change as if they have a divine right to intrude into our lives. "A guy has to make money," says a proprietor of tourism and pornography sites. My response is a guy doesn't have to make his money in such an annoying way. I look forward to the elimination of pop-up ads. Next, I hope something can be done about redirects — bots that grab users' browsers and take them to unrequested webpages.

Reasonably related

Note: This entry also appeared at Mac-a-ro-nies.