*hypf*

I faintly remember the times when games and other software came along with installation instructions (nowadays it seems most publishers assume that people can install software without instructing them). A common and recurring template was “Insert the CD into your CD ROM drive. The setup program should start automatically, if it doesn’t, follow these steps to turn on AutoPlay and try again: …”

This is, essentially, a non-solution. It solves a problem the customer doesn’t even have: Usually you don’t think ‘How could I turn on AutoPlay which I disabled a few weeks ago to save me from setups popping up?’ instead you want to run the setup that simply didn’t start automatically (which may be on purpose).

A similar situation occurred to me recently when I visited a web page that wanted to display an image in a popup. I have set my popup blocker to highly aggressive, so it blocks essentially everything that opens a new window. When I manually opened the link that caused the blocked popup in a new tab (a method that usually yields the content) I found myself on a page that explained in detail how I could either turn on Javascript or turn off my popup blocker.

Great. They are solving a problem I don’t even have. I just want to access the content.

Since the advent of popup blockers I doubt popups are a valid method of conveying information to the user anymore.