People hate pop ups because they are really really annyoing. They also have a lot of problems. A lot of people use pop up stoppers, and if you are using Mozilla you have one built into your browser. I don't use pop up stoppers because sites need to advertise, and it stops useful pop ups from launching (yes I am aware of pop up stopper but its still messy). Pop ups may also fail to launch because the users browser does not support JavaScript or it has been disabled by the user (I hate people like that but any problems they get on the net is there own fault).

Pop up links can't be followed by search engines either as they ignore script elements and site management tools such as Dreamweaver don't update the links. Not the easiest stuff to use then it seems.

Stopping the stoppers

You can't stop pop up stoppers from preventing your pop ups. Sorry to disapoint you but its a fact. However you can get round this problem. For example, here is a link a lot of sites use to create a pop up window:

<a href="#" onclick="window.open('file.htm');">

However you could use this instead:

<a href="file.htm" onclick="window.open('file.htm');return false;">

This way, if scripting is disabled, the standard link still works. You can easily make the standard link launch in a new window too by adding:

<a href="file.htm" onclick="window.open('file.htm');return false;" target="newWin">

This will also search engines to follow the standard link and so it will get indexed in.