New Google Toolbar Blocks Pop-Up Windows

The ability to block pop-up and pop-under ads, integrate with Blogger, and automatically fill out frequently used forms are three new features that Google released today in a new beta version of its popular toolbar for Internet Explorer. Users who download the toolbar into their Internet Explorer software can set it to block all pop-up and pop-under windows or only those from certain sites. The feature blocks advertising and editorial pop-up windows and will probably cause concern among the many major news sites, such as NYTimes.com, that regularly utilize advertising pop-up windows or other sites that use Javascript pop-up windows for editorial or menu purposes. Oddly, the new toolbar doesn’t block pop-ups generated by third-party software, such as Gator. The new toolbar also features an AutoFill function that automatically fills out frequently used Web forms (such as name, password, credit card numbers, etc.) with a click of a button. The Mozilla and Opera browsers have long offered auto-filling and pop windows blocking features.

Google’s new toolbar also integrates with Blogger’s weblogging service. A ‘BlogThis’ button automatically lets users connect to Blogger and post to their weblogs there. Google purchased Blogger earlier this year. The new toolbar doesn’t integrate with other blogging software, such as Radio Userland or Six Apart’s Movable Type.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.