We’ve all experienced pop-up tabs and windows, some seemingly innocuous, some seemingly malicious. My question is do any of them pose any sort of risk if you don’t interact with them at all and just close them?
Thanks
As with webpages, they can contain malicious code.
Use Task Manager to close the pop-up (or your browser), and not the X or close button which may execute malware. 
Even better is to block them
Yeah, that’s true. Thanks.
Ctrl-W closes tabs, Alt-f4 closes windows and Ctrl-Shift-Esc will bring up the Applications window of Task Manager. There are a few scareware pop-ups I’ve seen, often with audio, that hijack your browser (at least in Chrome) requiring a task manager closing of the browser.
Yes, and I often wonder whether there’s a best browser for preventing pop-ups, best Adblock/pop-up extension or if they all do a similar job.
You have to decide what you want to use yourself ofcourse.
I use :
- Opera
- Adblock Plus
- Ghostery
- NoScript suite
I’ve seen the last two referred to and I’ll look into them but could you give me a brief description of what they do? And does Opera have a superior pop-up blocker than other browsers if you know?
https://www.ghostery.com/why-ghostery/for-individuals/
https://noscript.net/
And for Opera, in all those years I am using it I’ve never seen a pop-up.
Thanks