I attended a UK briefing for Internet Explorer 8 last night. An interesting product which I’ll be writing plenty more about – you can get it here. Installed smoothly on my Virtual Box Vista.

At the event I mentioned to someone from the IE team that it is annoying how pop-ups still somehow get round the pop-up blocker. The guy seemed mildly surprised and asked me to send him any urls I found. I didn’t have to wait long. If you want obsessive detail on the recordings of Elvis Presley, a great site to visit is elvisrecordings.com [warning: pop-ups and pop-unders]. I can’t recommend it though, because there are some annoying scripts there. I thought this would make a good test for IE8 Beta 2. The home page has some stuff that gets blocked, and it has some Java which doesn’t run because I haven’t installed it yet, but if I click the link for the Sun recordings (arguably the best of Elvis) I get this:

The only extra step I took to get this screen was to click the pop-under in the task bar so it came to the front. Lucky me, I’m a “possible Audi A3 winner”.

Just to be fair, I tried it in FireFox 3. Same result:

Maybe it is just too difficult to block this stuff successfully without breaking pages.

The other question: why do otherwise useful sites pollute themselves with this junk? Is the money really that good? For what it’s worth, the culprit seems to be a “free” web stats provider called Motigo. Avoid.

I’ll forward the url to my contact.