For those individuals who do a lot of web surfing, having a popup blocker can mean the difference between surfing websites without any irritation or being bothered with having a new window open every time they navigate to a new page. Advertisers love to use popups to spread the word about a product or service that they are selling. Popups are actually just webpages that have been scaled down in size.

Most everyone dislikes popups; however, there may be times when a website user is happy to see a new pop up window open. One of these times may be when a website asks for information, such as an address or phone number from the website visitor. If the information request is allowed to open in another window, instead of the website changing pages, the user can simply go back to their original webpage and continue surfing. In cases such as this, a popup blocker is not needed and can be turned off.

When the popup blocker was first developed, users had to download the blocker and save it to their computer. The pop up blocker could then be turned on and off by the user and used to stop annoying popups. Later on, the pop up blocker became part of many major web browsers. During 2004, Microsoft added a pop up blocker to Internet Explorer by the way of service pack 2. Once the service pack 2 was released, everyone using Internet Explorer had the ability to block popups by simply turning the blocker on.

The popup blocker is used to block the many popups that arise when individuals visit various sites on the web. These popups can often force the user to continually close a large amount of windows that may open when certain websites are visited. There are times however, when a popup may be useful. This is mainly when the user needs to add information, such as their name or address. If this is the case, then the user can simply turn off their pop up blocker and then fill out the information in the popup window.