Poll: Are pop-ups here to stay?

Despite valiant efforts to come up with an alternative approach, pop-ups still infest the web. It seems like every site you visit wants you to sign up for a newsletter, take advantage of an offer, visit a sponsor, or provide feedback — all before you’ve actually reached the content you arrived to see. The value of the pop-up to designers is obvious: a piece of information that doesn’t need to be on screen all the time, doesn’t need to displace other more permanent elements of the design; creating its own window gives it temporary space, and the required prominence, without interrupting the rest of the layout. Pop-ups can easily be dismissed, often simply by clicking anywhere but on the pop-up. Psychologically they partition content, allow for competition entries, logins, and the like, to be focussed on for a short period of time. Pop-ups also neatly side-step the issue of opening new windows, maintaining a single session and preventing users from passively navigating away from a site. But pop-ups are also intrusive. They’re a lot like a waiter that tries to take your order before you’ve taken off your jacket. They’re easy to apply to a site with minimal disruption, but easy solutions are rarely good solutions. Usability testing tends to show that users dislike pop-ups — closing them as soon as possible — but that they also tend to understand them, perhaps because they mimic the basic UI of the OS. With usability so high on everyone’s agenda, did pop-ups simply evolve at the right time? Are they a stable design pattern, or a particularly persistent design trend?