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One of the most frequent questions I receive is how to get rid of Web pop-ups. Hundreds of shareware and commercial products exist that can help you liberate your cyberworld of these annoying ads. Recently, I've found a couple of Internet Explorer toolbars that also include pop-up killers. The good news is that they are free and include a number of other nifty features.
The folks at Google have a free toolbar you can download from http://toolbar.google.com. Along with a smart pop-up killer, it includes a number of other helpful features. You can do a Google search right from the toolbar without having to surf to Google first. With the highlight button, you can see your search words highlighted on the page. If you searched for multiple words, each word appears highlighted in a different color. With the Word Find button, you can automatically jump to the first instance of your search term on the page. The toolbar also has an "auto fill" Web form feature, so you don't have to retype common information into Web forms.
The Alexa toolbar from Amazon is another toolbar you can download for free. It's available at http://www.alexa.com and includes a pop-up killer. I found that Alexa's pop-up killer wasn't as smart as Google's in that it couldn't tell the difference between new browser windows I opened and an advertising pop-up. To save time surfing, I open multiple windows by holding down the Shift key when I click a link. When I did that, the Alexa toolbar asked me if I wanted to kill the pop up. (No.) Google's toolbar only killed advertising pop-ups.
I have both toolbars running and they seem to coexist fine. I turned off Alexa's pop-up killer, but kept the toolbar because it has other features. It's Related Links make it easy to find other sites that might be helpful in your search. The Related Links show where other people have gone who have been to the site you are viewing. Alexa also has a Wayback button that lets you see what a site looked like in the past, which is sort of entertaining.
If you like the Related Links idea, but don't want the whole Alexa toolbar, you can add a Related button to Internet Explorer. The button is not installed by default and uses the Alexa Related Links function. To add the button, choose View|Toolbars|Customize. Scroll down and find Related in the list of Available toolbar buttons. Click Add and then Close. The Related button appears on the your toolbar. Go to a Web page, click the button and you can see a list of pages with related content.
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