The pop-ups and redirects are probably the most annoying thing you can encounter while browsing the website. These are often used for spamming or redirecting you to a fishing site. Thankfully, Google Chrome has a feature that enables us to allow or block pop-ups and redirects. You can customize it for specific sites as well.
The pop-ups and redirects were used for merchant and payment gateway websites. This would help merchants collect the payment without closing the active sessions in the browser. It was the easiest way for the merchant site to identify the payment completions and revenue attribution.
But, due to many spammers and phishing sites, these two prominent features (pop-ups and redirect) were being misused heavily to spam or hack the user’s credentials. This leads to online scams and frauds.
Hence, merchant and eCommerce sites are now collecting the payments using the payment gateway redirection. Following the same, you enter the card details in the same window within the merchant sites, and only the authentication part is done at banking sites.
However, there are still great websites that rely on pop-ups, but you can allow those selected sites to use the pop-ups and redirection feature and block the pop-ups and redirects on the rest of the sites.
Allow Pop-ups and Redirect
Pop-ups and redirects feature is available in the Chrome browser. However, it’s blocked by default. Nonetheless, if a site needs this feature, you enable it to allow pop-ups or redirects easily.
Here are the steps to allow browser pop-ups and redirects:
- Open the Chrome browser on your computer, and select the Settings menu from More
options.
- Switch to the Privacy and Security tab in the left pane, and select the Site settings menu.
- Now, open the Pop-ups and Redirects option under the Content section.
- Switch the radio button to Sites can send pop-ups and use redirects option.
This will allow all the websites to use pop-ups and redirects in the Chrome web browser. If you want to allow only a specific website for pop-ups and redirects, add those URLs to the Allow section.
Block Pop-ups and Redirect
Keeping the pop-ups and redirects feature enabled for all the websites is risky. If you do not need these options, you should consider blocking pop-ups and redirects on your Chrome browser. Here are the steps to block browser pop-ups and redirects:
- Open the Chrome browser on your computer, and select the Settings menu from More options.
- Switch to the Privacy and Security tab in the left pane, and select the Site settings menu.
- Now, open the Pop-ups and Redirects option under the Content section.
- Switch the radio button to Don’t allow sites to send pop-ups and use redirects option.
This will completely block pop-ups and redirect windows for all the websites in the Chrome browser. If you want to block it for a few websites, add those URLs to the Block section.
The URLs added into Allow or Block section will work irrespective of the main switch within Pop-ups and redirects.
Bottom Line
The pop-ups and redirects blocker is a great feature to block these distractions by default. However, if you need the website to send pop-ups, you can disable the pop-up blocker within the Chrome computer browser.
Chrome also offers the feature to add the selected site URL that will be allowed or blocked from sending the pop-up windows. Add the site URL under the correct bucket and make the pop-ups and redirects blocker work automatically.
Similarly, you can block or allow pop-ups on the Chrome Android browser. You can also allow selected sites to send pop-ups on mobile devices.
What is your custom option setup for pop-ups and redirects? Have you disabled the pop-up blocker?
Lastly, if you've any thoughts or feedback, then feel free to drop in below comment box. You can also report the outdated information.
