Bing Popup Ads (Courtesy of Vibrant In-Text Advertising)

I like being able to use fancy mouseover effects and all that, but the annoying behavior of silly Bing popups all over many web pages that I visit have just gone over the top. Try to read a page and as you move your mouse anywhere – you get something that looks akin to this…

One or two might not be a problem. But when the page is littered with those annoying green links… I’ll be honest, I’ve actually just gone elsewhere that DOESN’T have those stupid popups. You just can’t seem to get the mouse out of the page window FAST enough to avoid them. Many times, trying to get the mouse out of the window (so you don’t accidentally roll over one of the links) DOES end up going over one of the links.

Sooooo… How to get rid of them? It’s not very intuitive.  I would love to see one of these things have the “Never Annoy Me With This Crap Again” button. Unfortunately, the ads don’t and it’s not very clear how to get rid of them.

To get to the disable/opt-out page shown, you can either wait to hit one of these annoying popups and click on the little “?” at the top right of the popup and it will take you to the Vibrant page, OR you can follow this link to the Vibrant In-Text Advertising OptOut page. If you don’t get the disable tab as shown, then just roll over the “highlighted words” area and you’ll immediately get the popup WITH the “?”.  It sets a cookie that will persist until you clean your cache or something similar. So your browser must accept cookies to disable them. IF you have your browser set to delete all cookies on exit, you’ll need to opt out every time. Note that in the image to the left, I have already DISABLED the ads. For some odd reason they seem to think that someone would like to ENABLE them.  Please.

Finally, browsing is fun again.  Stupid popups.

UPDATE: 4/10/2010

Well, that didn’t go as well as I had hoped. It actually only stopped the stupid popup ads on THAT site.  Had to dig deeper to the root of the problem. And what I came up with is there IS no way to actually tell the fine folks at Vibrant you don’t want your browser continually popping up their crap.

Enter Adblock Plus – at least for Firefox. I only use Internet Explorer when I’m checking web site compatibility and I didn’t really bother to see if it was available for that browser or not. For all I know it installed on all my browsers. This handy utility DOES indeed block all that garbage and likely much more – my biggest concern was those stupid Vibrant ads though.  Gone are the days of running the minefield of vibrant ads while mousing through a web page! And it works on ALLLLL the pages!