I have an extremely negative view of adware. Anything that makes me deviate from what I am trying to do is an irritant. I am one of those people that will pay money to rid of ads in a free app. (Of course, I also like to buy shareware too. I like the thought of someone writing a nice little app, and getting a little piece of money from thousands of people...)
I have noticed a very irritating form of online ads lately. It pops up in your face on a web page, so...you go to click on it to get rid of it. As you click, the whole thing shifts just a little, and...click...you have now clicked on something that launches some other web page that you now have to get rid of. The timing seems to vary on how it interacts with the mouse before it moves, as if they have programmed in a random value generator or something, so...you can’t quite predict it. It is pretty irritating, but I have to admit, I nearly very nearly admire the deviousness of it.
I remember one that was a little dialog box on a web page from the mid 90’s that every time you got the mouse near the ‘Close’ button the box would move, trying to get you to chase it all around the page. One learned to close the page, instead...
Do the idiots that devise these nuisance ads really think that their victims are going to be inclined to buy their products or services? Furthermore, I have no patience for websites that allow these ads.
I never click on pop-ups, since I don't know how they were designed. I don't know if clicking top right X in the popup will close the popup or will launch some new unwanted process.
Most popups go away if the page is reloaded. That's all I ever do to get rid of a popup. If a popup reloads when the page reloads, I just forget about reading that page.
I have Flash set on Ask to Activate, I have Java disabled in browsers, I use an ad blocker, and for some sites I use YesScript to block Javascript.
It keeps the annoyances down to an acceptable level.
NoScript; Ghostery.
As do I. I think malware authors should be hunted down and summarily killed.