I Love Popups
I love popups. I realized that today as I was testing a web design in Netscape 4.x (just to see how bad it would look, for the sake of curiosity and amusement) and upon launching, it went to CNN.com. It promptly displayed a popup window.
It took me a little off guard because, having been using Mozilla and Safari for so long now, I have almost forgotten that popups even existed anymore. Then I realized that only these old decrepit browsers still suffer from popup windows.
And that's when it hit me -- popups are the compelling reason for your average user to upgrade to modern browsers. And thus to browsers that support web standards.
The only fly in the ointment is Internet Explorer, which has a number of third party popup blocker solutions, including one from Microsoft that is to be released with the next patch for IE 6. But then, IE has a host of it's own problems, many far more worse than popups.
So, bring 'em on! Between sites that just don't look right, a steady stream of popup ads and all those security issues, people will eventually upgrade.
I never used to think that anyone would benefit from using Netscape 4.x, but you've showed me an entire group of people: people who design using web standards!!