Many webmasters, including myself have a dislike for popups, popunders, exit consoles, and the like. In the early days of the Internet they were the tactics used by unscrupulous and unethical webmasters, some of which created popup/under after popup/under in an endless stream that at times ended up crashing a users browser.
This gave all popups and popunders a bad reputation. So bad in fact, that a whole industry cropped up to create software that blocks both popups and popunders. Microsoft has even installed a popup blocker right into its latest version of Internet Explorer.
A ton of articles have been written about the evil of using popups and popunders and enough people have downloaded and installed some form of popup blocker that most of the unscrupulous webmasters have moved onto other methods. (Such as installing spyware on users computers as they enter a website, but we will leave that subject for a future article.)
There are of course still webmasters out there who misuse every tool that comes along. They will not put the same effort into making money legitimately on the web as they will to create ways to trick people into clicking something. These...