Popup Windows

Comments

# Addy Santo said on June 15, 2004 10:37 AM:

One of the dangers of pop-ups is that their behavior isn't well defined and changes from browser to browser. I often use MyIE2 ( a tabbed browser) and popups open as just another tab, which can be confusing. The newly-released XP SP2 changes the default popup blocking behavior of vanilla IE as well. Bottom line is- for intranet apps targetting specific user populations and browsers it is fine, but I wouldn't recommend 'em for general web usage.

# Scott Galloway said on June 15, 2004 10:39 AM:

In addition, Popups are not good for accessibility - reading software just doesn't cope and it's very easy for users to get lost. Oh, and of course if like me you use the Google bar - you just don't see popups...

# Scott Galloway said on June 15, 2004 10:39 AM:

Oh, good quick reference for accessibility (which mentions the popup issue) http://www.gulland.com/articles/2911032.jsp

# John Cartin said on June 15, 2004 10:41 AM:

Personally, I use popups prolifically in my web applications. These applications are primarily intranet apps, so I usually don't have to worry about pop up blockers.

The amount of freedom I get in my UI design is worth all the hassle that it involves. I normally use it when I am displaying a list of items that I want to edit, the user clicks on a link and a "modal" pop up opens with all the details that the user can manipulate and then save. The user never has to leave the main list of items and I can intelligently refresh the data on the server side if needed. With a little creativity, this can be a powerful option.

I, however, don't see the usefulness of a modaless dialog window in a web application as it can easily get lost behind the main window and the user can have a hard time coming to grips with how it works. Confusion is never a good thing to introduce.

John

# Addy Santo said on June 15, 2004 10:45 AM:

BTW, what timezone is 4:45PM? It is 10:45AM here...

I never noticed that the server uses clients' timezones. Interesting.

# dylan said on June 15, 2004 10:48 AM:

Pop ups? What are those? I haven't seen a popup for ages, since I started using Firefox.

I think the primary thing to remember with popups is to make sure that they still work if they are viewed full screen. I have my browser set up so that a pop up (that I've opened myself - self-opening ones won't work for me) automatically opens in a new tab at full screen. So don't use any 100% width tables assuming that the window is going to be tiny.

# Aidas said on June 15, 2004 10:55 AM:

Date picker or any other picker popups are very nice for me, but growing popularity of popup blockers makes to consider the use of popups in web app...

# Gerry Heidenreich said on June 15, 2004 11:00 AM:

INTRANET: Yes! - Usually a search-results page that contains a datagrid.
INTERNET: No way, and it would be quite a battle to regain visitors' trust in popups, modal or otherwise.

HOWEVER!

A modal-popup would be the PERFECT SOLUTION to discovering if a user does have popup support! Assume popups aren't supported by your visitor unless they pass the "popup test", in which case they can enjoy a richer experience on your site ;)

# AndrewSeven said on June 15, 2004 11:05 AM:

http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_10/navigating_isnt_fun.htm

# Jeff said on June 15, 2004 11:19 AM:

Does any one else dispise the word "rich" or "richer" when talking about UIs? I do. Coffee is rich, French silk pie is rich, Bill Gates is rich. UI's are not rich.

# Jeff said on June 15, 2004 11:19 AM:

despise*

# Paschal said on June 15, 2004 11:26 AM:

Dino I agree popups can be legitimate. However since popup blockers are popular, you can't really rely on them. An it's the same for Internet/Intranet application.
I don't see myself explaining to 400 users that on Intranet they should let their Google toolbar open the popup. Maybe I can write somewhere on the web page to use the Ctrl key to open a window. Another approach I do now is DHTML and CSS to open 'fake' popups using DIV tags. Check Dabs.com for an example or one of my site Scoilnet.com where the Clipboard on top right is a DIV tag. Works well, and I was also able to drop a shadow behind !
The difficulty also with standard popus and .Net is the transfer and retrieval of values. On the same site check the Poll box and you should understand what I mean.

# Alex said on June 15, 2004 12:21 PM:

I'm using modal dialogs in our intranet app, but i dislike them in the www.

# Sergio Pereira said on June 15, 2004 01:31 PM:

I think users in general tend to not want their focus moved away from the main window. As developers we face some of the most challenging UI designs just to get our work done, and we take it naturally. Examples of these are the damned TreeViews, modal dialogs, context menus (right-click), browsing for files, etc.
Unfortunately, not every user sees those things as natural. They can be pretty scary at times.
The bottom line for me is: know your users, realize your audience's level of fluency using the UI.
Specifically for pop-ups, the modal ones can alleviate users' anxiety by not letting them navigate away from the main window for too long.

# Dino Esposito said on June 15, 2004 01:54 PM:

Within a page displayed through a popup, how can you make sure that all clicks are captured and the page refreshes in the same popup? I haven't been able to find any better solution than wrapping the page in a IFRAME tag. I tried with target attributes but unsuccessfully. Am I doing something bad?

# Shawn B. said on June 15, 2004 01:54 PM:

I write an enterprise (a true enterprise app) web app for insurance agencies (5000+ users) and we use popups very heavily for requesting information from the user without having to navigate the user away from the main page. It also allows them to "cancel" without having to retrieve info from the server (to relieve the stress on the datacenter). They popup and they center on the screen. This is fine for an intranet app and I couldn't imagine writing such a huge complex system without these kinds of popups but I also couldn't imagine doing this in a tabbed browser, that would be horrible for the kind of look and feel and experience we are providing. We would never support a tabbed browser, and if they changed (or if IE changed) we would have to make significant changes to about 40% of our application that took us 4 years and 20+ developers (ASP/ASP.NET C#) to put in place to begin with.

For the general Internet, I don't like popups (most of anykind). I think they have been abused and put a bad taste in people's mouth. But for Enterprise Applicatations that run on an Intranet/Extranet they are acceptable as we are providing a windows-like experience in HTML (to keep it familiar with our userbase who aren't technology experts).


Thanks,
Shawn

# Anatoly Lubarsky said on June 15, 2004 03:15 PM:

I like popups and always use them in my apps. I mean the ones that are opened by user button click and they are opened with window.open function that is incapsulated in more generic Javascript function. To those folks that "don't like popups of any kind" I can say that may be you don't know how to handle app design and/or use basic Javascript and Html. Popups have nothing to do with whether it is internet or intranet as I can see some folks suggest.

On the contrary - frames is definitely a bad practice especially in asp.net.

# Gerry Heidenreich said on June 15, 2004 03:30 PM:

I beg to differ:
The practicality of popups has virtually EVERYTHING to do with your audience.

Certain practices, such as using popups, IE-specific markup, or even proprietary API calls over the web can be completely practical in a controlled environment like an intranet.

# Jerry Pisk said on June 15, 2004 09:31 PM:

I don't understand the point of poping up windows so the user doesn't have to navigate from a "main" page. If they didn't want to navigate then they wouldn't, and if they are editing a record they do not need to see the list of all records - their task at the moment is filling out a form, not looking at the list in the background. How would you like Microsoft's home page (any of their home pages) to open its links in popups so you wou;dn't have to navigate back to it and to reduce the load on their servers?

# David Yack said on June 15, 2004 11:30 PM:

My favorite was the client that insisted on popups, but their IT staff encouraged blockers...it was a great mix :)

I think smart ASP.NET input controls that make it easier to provide input flow are really needed some of the 3rd party controls that are coming out are really starting to look really good. And allow you to start building UI's without as much desire to insist on popups.

Besides, popup ad's have pretty much given popup's a bad name...

# ben.lovell@bbc.co.uk (Ben Lovell) said on June 16, 2004 10:46 AM:

With the proliferation of popup blockers (google toolbar etc) I would say its a safe assumption nowadays that popups on *internet* websites won't be seen in most cases.
Intranet is a different story altogether (you would think), but even here at the BBC we have people who have installed software against company policy and have had to deal with issues in our apps caused by popup or javascript blockers!

# Jason brown said on June 16, 2004 11:29 AM:

I have to say that popups were a useful resource some time ago, the problem was that they got severely misused and many people, myself included, just barred them. I use the google bar to stop popups but there are many other ways of stopping them these days.

# Shawn B. said on June 16, 2004 02:26 PM:

RE: What Jerry Pisk said...

You don't understand our application (based on the comments you provided). Our Intranet site is a Web Application for insurance agencies. The way the analysts designed the workflow is such that in many of our Search pages or other major information presentation pages... the information is presented and they have the option to click a "detail" icon and it'll show a popup window (akin to a modelless dialog in a windows application). The user isn't trying to "leave" the main page that is presenting the info, they are just trying to manipulate a value or two and so the popups provide a way to allow them to make such changes without having to nagivate the main page away... (the information should be present in the background when these popups are in place).

It's just the architecture of the application. It is not a web site, a discussion board, or a blog. It handles the entire lifecycle of a mid-size insurance carrier, agency, or broker and all their affilliates from policy management, all the accounting, claims, CRM and ERP aspects and so much more. The application would definately be unintuitive without the popups.


Thanks,
Shawn

# Wolfgang said on June 17, 2004 02:40 AM:

I think popups are great, even on the Internet. You know why? It's so darn easy to get rid of 'em. Just click that nice close button and gone they are. Now all browsers have popup-blockers, those nasty advertising companies will have to find new ways to annoy us with their advertisements. And this time 'round, you can be sure that they'll find some technique for which blocking would equal severely limiting the usability of the WWW/browser. Sad but true: the Internet is not a free place, money has to come from somewhere....

In Web applications, I think popups should obey one important rule: they must not allow another popup. That way, the user will be presented with at most one popup. That one popup can be used for messages (no interaction required) or queries (like search, little interaction required). This means it should also be rather small, compared to the main window.

Oh, and whenever you feel the need to provide the user with a popup, so information in the main window remains visible, you should rethink that strategy. Small information elements can be made part of the new screen, while big chunks of information will not be visible anyway (unless you require a dual monitor setup, the popup will almost certainly block that information).

# Rob Williams said on June 17, 2004 08:04 AM:

I wanted to echo Shawn B's comments of popups providing a good application UI and workflow. First up be clear this is for Intranet only and not for the wibbly-wobbly-world.

Intranet web "applications" are just that - they are NOT websites. You are not providing a general user with some browsable information. This is a business application which just happens to be delivered to a browser. In fact in many cases a web app is just one client for a set of business components which are also utilised by web services and windows forms.

Take an Intranet contact system for example. I want to be able to view more than one record at a time, copy data from one record to another etc. this just isnt possible with one browser window.

Don't get me wrong. I HATE www advertsing popups. But I don't let that cloud my judgement when designing Intranet applications. I want to give my users the most intuitive and "Rich" interface and experience and popups are just one of many options Intranet developers can take advantage off to do just that. If you have a captured audience why dumb down functionality to the lowest common denominator when none exists? The same applies for IE specific DHTML, HTML Components etc

Rob

# Jerry Pisk said on June 17, 2004 02:59 PM:

Rob, how exactly are you going to move data between two records if you show them in modal popup dialogs? The fact that they are modal means that you can only work with one and only that one window in the whole app. that was my whole point, if you show a modal dialog there's nothing else the user can do with the app so there really is no reason to show the rest of the app. You can't interact with it, you can't scroll it to lookup information, you can't copy text out of it. You're probably talking about multiple modaless windows, that's a different story.

I personally build internet applications (what you call an application, except it's used over the net, by customers, not just internally by employees) so believe me, I know what the difference between a web app and a presentation web site is.

# Yuval said on June 22, 2004 05:38 AM:

regarding this feed of popups i have a question
hotmail empty trash pop up is a nice woek around the popup window.
its a window inside the window with no trace in the taskbar.
it could be an iframe that looks like a window.
but my question is simple does any one know how did they make it?

# M. Rajesh said on June 25, 2004 03:19 AM:

Well most of the time I use popups is that calendar control that pops up when you click on the button programmed to open the calendar, select a date and then put the selected date in the textbox which is read only.

Well i never make them modal-less because I wonder if it is ever possible and in some cases if you have a pop up calendar already open and it is somewhere behind the parent window and you click on the button to invoke it again nothing happens and then you realise that it is already open by alt-tabbing through your open windows.

# davevh said on June 28, 2004 01:51 PM:

Are there any products that can block popup's on an entrprize level. ?

# Djoyn said on July 14, 2004 05:11 PM:

I use pop-ups. My pop-ups are as a result of user's clicking "print", because I call up Crystal Reports, export to pdf, then open the pdf in a new window, making it super easy for users to get pretty results.

But, as mentioned previously, I dislike them on the www, but they're ok in the intranet!

# S Kiran said on July 26, 2004 05:44 AM:

Hi, can i display two pop-up's at a time (when page loded)..?

# Web Designing said on June 13, 2007 03:37 AM:

It really look nice on web designing.

# mugjsh said on May 8, 2008 06:58 AM:

do we have security problems with Pop-ups?

# Diya said on May 28, 2008 04:12 AM:

What about Popup in asp.net window application?

# chat N° 1_123love said on June 28, 2008 03:14 PM:

popus windows ma bloque de chater

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