fyngyrz's Journal: Mouseovers - as bad as popups?

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

Mozilla does have a way to deal with them

[srmalloy]

I have to thank the people who developed Adblock [wikipedia.org] as a plugin for Mozilla; it enormously simplifies the process of eradicating the intrusive "context link" popups -- originally from Vibrant Media, and then from a variety of other companies. If I find a reference in a web page that interests me, I'll look it up on my own; I don't want to have some advertising company's decision about what [b]I[/b] want to see in connection with that reference slapped into my face. I may not look up the reference right away; I

Depends

[astrotek]

If the mouseover functions like a menu or gives a fish eye effect to thumbnails or generally aides me in using the website faster then I'm fine with it.

If it doesn't then adblock comes into play.

Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!

[Valdrax]

Honestly, I think that this is a problem that you're making for yourself. Why on Earth are you moving the mouse over text that you're actively in the middle of reading? The concept puzzles me, quite frankly, and I can't figure out one good reason to do it.

Re:

[bobbonomo]

accidentally activate is the keyword here. You may move the cursor to go to the scroll bar and bam you roll over one of these. It's just a variation of advertising. A bit annoying especially that you can't stop it.

Re:

[TehZorroness]

many times as I scroll through a page with the mouse wheel, my cursor ends up above one of these links. Especially on highly saturated sights.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Yes, good call, that's what bites me on ebay, I use the roller to scroll and then the mouse isn't over what it used to be over, and blam, I have a popup.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Well, its like this. When I'm reading, I'm not really paying attention to my mouse. I jiggle it, I move it, sometimes I push it up into the menu area (I'm usually on a Mac) and it just crosses the text I'm reading. I'm thinking about what I'm reading, not my mouse. I readily admit that I am not a sophisticated enough being to split my attention so as to steer around text on a page. I'm just a failure that way. But - it didn't used to be a problem. Now it is. Regularly. And I'm tired of it.

Um. Actually,

Intellitext

[ror]

Your beef is with intellitext, an advertiser that makes "green links" which are actually key-worded mouseover adverts. This IS very annoying if, like me you use your mouse to highlight while reading text. However, turning off javascript eliminates this problem, along with most other forms of advertising, and I recommend the firefox extension for this purpose.