More about Popups

The Popups for pictures on www.pcurtis.com and www.uniquelynz.com work well with most recent versions of the mainstream browsers, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. That is all the browsers with more than 2% market share. There are however various factors which can still cause problems.

Popups are abused by many advertisers and most browsers offer preference settings, extensions or other ways ways to limit the abuse of popups. The same goes for various security suites. In general the default settings should not inhibit popups which follow all the rules properly although you may find that you are asked if will permit use of popups on my sites and it is safe and desirable to say yes.

Most of the browsers these days have a tabbed display rather than a series of separate windows. Some of the less common 'lightweight' browsers may open a popup window in a tab instead of a correctly sized window. This is much more difficult to use and has the associated problem that the reuse of a window incorrectly displayed as a tab may not work correctly and they may not be closed when the page is left. This also makes them difficult to use with many other sites such as banking sites or anywhere that help information is displayed in a popup window. Midori and Epiphany are examples of browsers which do not handle popups in the way one would expect. Both are based on WebKit code. Chrome also uses Webkit code but handles popups fine although it has difficulty in bring a popup back into focus (ie displayed in front of the main page) - this meant I have included a dedicated 'fudge' in the popup code for Chrome as it now has over 20% of the browser 'market'. Firefox 4 initially tended to lose focus but updated versions and version 5 and higher now handle focus correctly so an earlier 'fudge' has been removed as it had other undesirable side effects - it is best to updated if you have any ananomolies.

Opera has a minor problem - the popup windows are displayed the correct size and are also attached to there own tab which is opened and closed in tandem with the windows - this is a good compromise between tabs and windows. However Opera has a preference setting which, currently by default, prevents any popups being brought back into focus and this needs to be changed if you plan to spend much time on my pages. You reach it by clicking the Opera Button the Settings -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> JavaScript Options and tick Allow raising of Windows. You can in any case bring the popup window into focus from its tab or the operating system toolbar although this can be tedious if you have a system with a 'dock' such as Ubuntu Unity. I have also noticed that closing Opera does not always close down the tabs with associated popups

For everyone other than the most advanced or adventurous users there should be no problems and that elite will know the solutions as well as I do!