Popups, if you’re somehow, strangely, not familiar with term, are those little windows that open when you visit certain sites.

Popups are secondary browser windows that are opened up using JavaScript code. The properties of this new browser window are set in such a fashion that new window does not have an address bar, status bar or menu.

Until about a few years ago, popup was considered to be biggest breakthrough in advertising on web.

When they were first introduced they were a great success and click-through rates went through roof.

Exit banner ad - enter popup.

Web marketers could interrupt whatever a visitor was viewing, by launching a secondary window on top of first to draw attention to their advertisement or opt-in list or any other item that they wished to get attention to.

After a while, like most good marketing tools, popups started getting abused. Popups would open secondary popups and eventually by just visiting page that has a single popup in it, you would end up with a barrage of say about 15-20 popups. This was exploited by unscrupulous marketers to fullest, especially those hawking porn sites.

Of course, webmasters who were in tune with sentiment of visitors, soon began to use cookies to track if popup was already shown and ensure it was not shown more than once per visitor.

But, frustrated visitors soon began complaining about popups.

Popups are your problem? - Get a popup blocker. Looking at need of website visitors, software companies soon came up with popup blocking software. These applications read all code that's going to browser and if they find any JavaScript in page code that's trying to open a window, BAM, it deletes that part of code. So Bye Bye popup!

Generation Two - The PopUnder Not to be left behind, web marketers came up with another version, popunder, which still launched a secondary window but placed it below primary window. In most cases, visitor didn’t even notice this popunder until they closed primary window.

Of course this was less intrusive, but a pain nonetheless and you don't get an award for guessing what happened next.

Yes you guessed right, popup blockers soon started blocking popunders as well.

Generation Next - Enter Hover Ads What beejeezus are Hover Ads? They are floating ads that popup blockers can't stop.

The technology that creates Hover Ads is not new. In fact, it’s been available to web designers for at least 2 years now as DHTML (that's Dynamic HTML to those who don't know).

These ads cannot be seen by older browsers like Internet Explorer 3.0. But since most netizens are using browsers (IE 4.0 and above) that are capable of displaying this code this type of advertising has started enjoying a rise in usage.

Hover Ads are DHTML layers which can be selectively moved and displayed over primary page that's being displayed. The basic code is still JavaScript, but since a new window is not being opened, popup blockers can't figure out that an advertisement is being displayed.