Understanding popup filters

Popup filters are the primary mechanism by which popup advertisements are blocked by Ad Annihilator. All decisions that Ad Annihilator makes on whether to accept and open a popup are controlled by popup filters. Both simple and advanced techniques for blocking of banners (see What can I do to block advertisements?) affect popup filters, but the simple technique manipulates banner filters implicitly in an easy-to-use manner while the other implies direct manipulation of filters by the user. This section is intended for advanced users who want to understand how popup filters work in Ad Annihilator. In most cases, understanding of popup filters is not necessary and users may use simple technique for popup blocking.

Popup filters are very similar to banner filters. See Understanding banner filters for more information on banner filters.

The only differences between banner and popup filters are:

1. Popups filters disable all popups by default while banner filters enable banners by default. In other words, popup filters detail which popups are exception to general rule and should be enabled. On contrary, banner filters detail which resources are disabled as opposed to general rule.
2. There are fewer filtering options for popups than for windows. You cannot filter popups by their content type and size.

This difference has the only implication on textual filter interpretation discussed in Understanding banner filters - the last statement at global and in all "if" conditions should be "Otherwise, reject popup" instead of "Otherwise, accept banner".

For example, consider the following filters

should be interpreted as follows:

If a popup is from nytimes.com, accept it, except popups from nytimes.com/images (that are rejected).
If browsing banner.com then if a popup is from banner.com, accept it, otherwise reject it.
If a popup is from banner.com, reject it.
Otherwise, reject popup.

Popup filters are viewed and edited in Popup filters tab.