How To Use The Pop-up Blocker in Internet Explorer 11

Pop-ups can often be distracting, annoying and dangerous at the same time, especially if they have malicious media or links. It, thus, becomes essential at times to block the pop-ups in the browser for a safe and pleasant browsing experience. While Chrome leads the consumer market, Internet Explorer still leads the market for enterprise browsing.

A variety of reasons contribute to this, the first being the backward compatibility for older enterprise applications. The second is the use of IE standards by major enterprise apps including Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, and others. Owing to the security and other reasons, most enterprise laptops and desktops use only IE browser.

Internet Explorer comes with its own Pop-Up Blocker that enterprises can use to get rid of pop-up windows displaying while surfing the web and accessing local intranet pages. The browser lets you control the settings for Pop-Up Blocker through its Internet Options panel. One can change settings like notification types, the sites to allow pop-ups from and preset filter levels.

In this tutorial, we learn how to use the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer 11 and change different settings to make the most out of this feature.

Enable/Disable the Pop-Up Blocker

1. Internet Explorer’s privacy settings can be used to control the Pop-Up Blocker feature. To activate the pop-up blocker, you can select ‘Internet Options’ from the ‘Tools’ icon to display the Internet Options panel. The icon for Tools looks like a gear.
2. Access IE’s privacy settings through the ‘Privacy’ tab if it is not already active.
3. You should now see the privacy-based options available for the browser. You can see the ‘Pop-Up Blocker’ section towards the bottom with a button and checkbox.
4. The option for ‘Turn On Pop-Up Blocker’ is enabled by default and you are allowed to toggle the functionality on and off. You can remove the checkmark to disable the browser’s pop-up blocker at any time. Clicking on the checkbox again re-enables the feature again. Click on the Apply button at the bottom-right corner of the window.

Pop-Up Blocker Settings                   

When you enable the Pop-Up Blocker feature, it gets activated with the default settings. To modify the settings, one can use the ‘Settings’ button under the Pop-Up Blocker header under the Privacy tab.

The Settings window allows creating a whitelist of sites where you want pop-ups to be permitted. You can also make changes to how you get notified whenever a pop-up is blocked. This option also lets you modify the restriction level of the pop-up blocker.

The top-most section is Exceptions that allows adding or removing the website addresses from which you want the pop-ups to be displayed. You can add a website to the whitelist by entering its address in the edit field and selecting the Add button. Use the Remove or Remove All buttons to delete a single website or all entries in the whitelist.

Notifications

The Internet Explorer allows you to configure whether you want it to notify you about the activity of the Pop-Up blocker. The option can be found under the ‘Settings’ button in the Privacy tab. The default setting for your IE11 notifies you whenever it blocks a pop-up.

You can stop notifications from Pop-Up Blocker by removing the checkmark from the checkbox for displaying the notification bar whenever a pop-up is blocked.

Another notification setting is ‘Play a Sound When a Pop-Up is Blocked’. Enabled by default and accompanied by a checkbox, this setting tells IE11 to play an audio tune whenever a pop-up window is blocked by the browser.

Blocking Level

Another setting configurable through a drop-down menu, lets you choose from a group of preset configurations for the pop-up blocker in your Internet Explorer 11. By default, your pop-up blocker does not block pop-ups from the websites listed in your Trusted or Local Security zones.

• High – This level of blocking when selected blocks the pop-up windows from all the websites. You can override the restriction using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT.
• Medium – This is the default setting that blocks pop-ups from all sites except those located within the Trusted Sites or Local Intranet zones.
• Low – This blocking level blocks pop-up windows except those from the websites known to be secure.

We hope this article about using pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer 11 proves to be helpful to users. Do share your suggestions and experiences in the comments section below.