It is common for me to visit a website and then be presented with a "pop-up" box.
This is not a true "pop-up," in the sense that it is not a new browser window that has been created without the approval of the user; it exists within the already open window. But, it is a nuisance like a traditional "pop-up," because it either prevents the user from clicking or scrolling anywhere outside the box or dims the background to such a point that the original webpage content is obscured.
While at times neither of these handicaps occur, the large box still dominates the screen, which is distracting.
Regardless of its nature, the user must perform some action to make the box disappear so that the user can view the unobscured page.
The box usually requests some personal information, particularly an email address or social media account. The user must either provide this information or exit out of the box to see the webpage in its entirety.
Sometimes the pop-up box is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It poses some patronizing question to the user, which merely serves as an "inviting" pretext to acquire the user's information. An example of this initial inquiry might be, "Are you a good person?"
If the user wants to exit out of the box, the user is forced to click on an even more patronizing answer (which is supposed to be "clever"), e.g., "No, I am not. I like murdering puppies and stepping on sandcastles."
I have never once entered my personal information in any of these unsolicited boxes, and the likelihood is low that I will ever want to do so.
My justification? Before I would want to hand my contact information to a random website, I must first trust the website and be interested in its content. Generally, this process takes me more than a few seconds, so I habitually exit out of the box without ever considering its request.
To be clear, I am not referring to the more oppressive form of pop-up box that might state an instruction along the lines of, "You must disable your ad-blocking extension before viewing this page." or, "Please disable Adblock to support us."
In case you are unfamiliar with the email-request pop-up that I've described, here is just one example (out of countless infringing websites):
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/fcc-graciously-sets-internet-providers-free-sell-data/
(It takes about 5 seconds for the email request pop-up to appear on this particular webpage.)
In this specific example, while the background is only slightly dimmed (instead of being very dimmed or blurred), the page completely "freezes" when the pop-up appears. The user cannot scroll or click anything outside of the box. To close the box, the user must click on the "x" in the top-right corner of the pop-up, or submit their information.
If you refresh the page or click on a different article on this site, the pop-up will not appear again. That is, pop-ups are automatically prevented if one already has a Wired.com cookie saved on their computer.
Now that I've articulated the problem, I am hoping that somebody has a solution that would, ideally, work universally across all or most websites.
I have tried downloading the Adblock, Adblock Plus, and uBlock Origin browser extensions and enabling every possible filter that is provided within these extensions. Still, I have found that these three extensions do not reliably inhibit the pop-up info-requests (which makes sense, as I don't believe that they are designed to).
My fear is that the manner in which these websites implement the pop-up request boxes is too generic or broad for any extension to reliably block these pop-ups (that is, without also disabling desirable or user-initiated pop-up boxes in the process).
My browser of choice is Google Chrome.
OS X El Capitan, version 10.11.6.
