Anyone else notice this trend. Google maps is a prime example, and there is no love for the new Google maps as far as I can tell. I found them annoying with putting your mouse in the wrong place then get hit with a popup that blocks the map, and very slow compared to the older very much loved maps. Now Google is slowing down it’s mail with what they call Inbox. Not mandatory (yet?), but again slow and has a popup like loading of info contained in the mail. Not exactly a true popup, but a annoying reloading of the page info, moving things around on the page making it harder to read.
And to be fair it is just not Google with the popups, Meetup has them if you happen to mouse in the wrong place, someone’s profile will popup hiding what you want to see and won’t go away till you mouse over some elses profile momentarily. cNet has become so bad with this, not really popups but with page scrolling (jumping into different sections) that it is becoming almost unreadable.
Maybe they are hoping to break down our current learned response to pop-ups of mentally avoiding eye contact with the content and seeking to x them out as soon as possible. By providing actual content in a pop-up, now we will have to modify this reaction by actually looking at them, thus exposing ourselves to valuable (to them) microseconds of ad content in the future and being subtly influenced into flinging our money at them.
Google Images gets on my nerve. The initial page isn’t bad but when you click an image in the search results a sub-window almost as large as your browser window pops up with a larger version of the image you clicked on, plus a bunch of other “similar” images. I find that jarring to begin with, but if you then click the Back button in your browser (or the thumb button on my mouse), it takes you out of the Images page entirely. I do that all the time.
I’ve done thousands of Google image searches and the stupid popup control-z is complaining about never registers as a popup in my brain. Possibly because it’s a very ugly flat dark grey box that extends from one edge of the browser to the other and the control to close it is a slightly less grey x.
I develop Web and mobile applications for a living, so I know exactly what they’re doing. I just forget about 50% of the time and hit the back button. I don’t think I’ve ever had that problem anywhere except Google Image search.