Can Microsoft stop pop-up ads with IE?

Using Mozilla you can stop pop-up ads from appearing when you visit web sites. Can Microsoft stop pop-up ads with IE?

I don't think they can. There is an interesting tactic named "Aikido marketing" that I learned about when reading a book named "Rules for Revolutionaries" by Guy Kawasaki. It's essentially a pull from "The Art of War", and Kawasaki describes it as "using an opponent's strength against itself, instead of meeting brute force with brute force." I think Mozilla has this advantage over Microsoft.

Because of Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies, the government and Microsoft's competitors are watching them very carefully. What do you think would happen if one arm of Microsoft is promoting msn.calm and msn.espn.calm, while another arm of the monopolist says "Hey, we're going to let you disable pop-up ads when you visit web sites", so if you go to a site and a pop-up ad for a Time-Warner holding doesn't appear when you use IE, Time-Warner is going to scream bloody murder. And so will other advertisers.

It was only a few months ago that when you went to msn.calm with Netscape, you saw a web page stating that you had to use IE to see that site's content.

Go Mozilla

Right now the Mozilla market share is probably so small that nobody really cares, but as it gets bigger, advertisers will start paying attention. And what will they (advertisers) do when they find that Mozilla is squashing their ads?

Hard to say, but what are their choices? Mozilla is open source (free) software, and they don't mean anyone any harm, they're just trying to create a great web browser, and 99.9% of the world agrees that getting rid of pop-ups and pop-unders will "maximize the end user experience", so if they can get rid of those bleeping ads, and it's free, sure I'm going to use it.

I started to make a list here of all the reasons that pop-ups and pop-unders are really bad ideas, and why I can't believe that advertisers like pissing of consumers, but I'll save that for another tirade. :)

For now ...

For now, I'm just happy to see Microsoft in a position that will be hard for them to get out of. After all, their browser is part of the operating system, and why would an operating system care about advertisements anyway?