Manually override the popup blocker in Internet Explorer

Depending on how a website was designed, having Internet Explorer's popup blocker enabled even at its default level of "Medium" could cripple the site or web application's core functionality. This is why you can add websites to a popup exceptions list and allow all popups from a given web page or site, as you may have learned from the previous tutorial. But you will often find yourself needing to view a popup photo gallery, for example, without wanting to actually add this one-time-visit website to your popup blocker's whitelist. We will show you in this tutorial how to manually override the popup blocker, and temporarily allow popup windows to open, regardless of your current blocking level.

How to temporarily allow popups for a website

You will know right away when a new window is blocked from a website because Internet Explorer will play the famous "popup blocked" sound, display the yellow information bar at the top of the screen, and show a blocked popup icon in the start bar:

And there are two typical cases in which a popup you want to let through will try to open: either when the web page loads, in which case you'll get the popup blocked signals without doing anything yourself, or when you actually click on a link on that page.

Allow a popup when the web page loads

If the popup you want to allow tried to open while the web page was loading, hit the F5 key on your keyboard to refresh the website / reload the web page in question, release F5, and while it loads, hold down simultaneously the Ctrl key and Alt key on your keyboard: this is the signal Internet Explorer is waiting for to see if you are going to temporarily allow the given popup to open.

Allow a popup to open when clicking a link

If the popup was blocked right when you clicked on the link, perform the same action as above: hold down simultaneously the Ctrl key and Alt key on your keyboard, and click on link in question (while still keeping these two keys pressed down until the popup has successfully opened).

...And this is all you need to do to temporarily override the Internet Explorer popup blocker and allow a few popups to open without having to put that website on your safe list!