Eliminate pop-ups and pop-unders with Chrome’s JavaScript Popup Blocker

Web pop-ups are annoying, intrusive, and potentially dangerous, which is why all the top browsers make at least some attempt to block them. Google’s Chrome is no exception, but it won’t stop everything, and so you might want to add a little extra protection in the shape of JavaScript Popup Blocker.

As you’ll guess from the name, this free extension aims to block all JavaScript-generated pop-up and pop-under windows. You don’t have to worry about configuration, at least initially, as it starts working right away: just carry on browsing as normal.

You should hopefully notice a difference immediately in the lack of irritating pop-ups. But if you need more details, the JavaScript Popup Blocker icon displays a count which increases whenever a pop-up is blocked, and clicking the icon will list any pop-up URLs.

This worked well enough for us, but we’ve also seen complaints that the extension can interfere with some legitimate sites. If this happens to you then there are a couple of steps you can take.

For example, by default JavaScript Popup Blocker works in "Whitelist" mode, which means it tries to eliminate popups on all but the sites you specify. If you find this causes problems on one or two domains, open the extension settings, add those sites to the whitelist, and their pop-ups won’t be blocked in future.

If this still isn’t enough then you might alternatively switch the JavaScript Popup Blocker to "Blacklist" mode, where it only blocks pop-ups on the sites you specify, when you know it’s safe to do so. This is very much a last resort -- the main point of pop-up blockers is to protect you on sites you’ve not visited before -- but it also worked for us, and could be useful if there’s no other way of eliminating pop-ups on one or two of your favourite sites.