I hate popup ads. Everyone does. You’re trying to read an article, perhaps on your phone, and these inline popups show up and obscure the content with ads for things you don’t care about.
We hate them more when they play music.
We hate them more when you can’t click on the tiny X on a phone.
But I have something I hate even more than that and it’s Apple’s fault.
You see, I use Safari sometimes to read on my phone. This is all well and good until I scroll on a slow site (probably slow because of their abuse of javascript laden social media toolbar crap that we didn’t care about to begin with) and my finger accidently brushes an ad. And then the ad opens the App Store to ask me if I want to download some idiotic game.
I take deep, calming, breaths and then I close out of the App Store, go back to safari, and I leave the page. Most of the time the article remains unread.
And why is this Apple’s fault? After all, the fault should lie with the idiots who thought that the best idea for a mobile site would be to have a bajillion ads.
This is Apple’s fault for two reasons:
- There’s no way to tell Safari not to open these
- There’s no ‘are you sure?’ message from Safari to let you decline
In fact, in all my research, the only thing you can do is to clear the browser cache and set Safari to only allow cookies from Current Websites Only. But as Apple warns you, that may cause issues with other sites.
This can be fixed! Apple can simply make it an option (hidden) to hide this. But also you website designers and developers, if someone says they don’t mind the popup ads and lightbox garbage on the mobile site, I want you do to me a favor.
Say no.
The web won’t get better unless you make it better. Please don’t make a website you’d hate too.
Oh and those ‘cool’ floating sidebars with the tweet links? They look terrible when you zoom in on the teeny tiny text on your website.
Stop it.
