It has been a very long time ago since I've seen a popup. However lately a somewhat similar but different annoyance started to appear for me.

Sometimes I'm reading the content of a website, for some reason move the mouse a bit, and the screen is filled with some annoying mouseover hover element right on top of the text I was reading!

Often this are either hover elements with "share on facebook, twitter, delicious, etc...", or things like "rate this content, more content here!". And the most annoying thing is, they don't go away when moving the mouse away from them!

It's not annoying when it happens once, but when it keeps happening all the time, e.g. when reading multiple pages of a wiki (not wikipedia), it forces me to block the javascript causing it. But then some other website I visit does the same again, and so on, you can't block them all, argh!!! They appear too easily and disappear too difficult.

IMHO, such things should only appear if you click the mouse on something, not if you move it above something. Only tooltips/bubbles that disappear easily and don't take much space should be allowed appear when moving the mouse over them.

Seems like I need a new type of "popup blocker". Do there exist any browser plugins that disable the annoying hover/mouseover elements, but still let other essential hover/mouseover elements (menus of some websites and such) working?

Does this phenomenon have a name?

Does anyone recognize my annoyance?

Yep I have encountered them too and they piss me off. Would be OK if they closed on mouse off.

Those are really annoying... I sometimes accidently click them thinking this is like Wikipedia and you get more information.

But what really annoys me these days are those Ads with Sound. Sometimes a random Pop up will open that I didn't even notice and will play some music... Then I panic and start hitting my Laptop to clense the Demons

I'm a big Fan of Advertising on the Internet, it's what keeps the Sites running and sometimes even advertise something interesting. But this new wave of "In your Face" type of Ads is a bit too much.

It's pretty easy to stop these with AdBlock. Generally these hoverlinks are generated by some third party site that is different from the one you are browsing on. If you just block the .js file that generates them they will go away and it won't impact any of the rest of the site's functionality.

Adblock plus NoScript, both set to "always off, forbid everything". Works like a charm with the exceptions that about 1/3 of the internet isn't readable. That may or may not be a deterrent for you.
The other 2/3 works mostly well with occasional formatting errors, but while the formatting was often horrid some years ago, the really poor sites seem to get fewer and fewer.

So, the only problem is that you're unable to see 1/3 of the internet (without explicitly allowing scripts). But then again, if a site is so piss poor that it won't display at all without full-page flash and/or javascript, then I usually don't want to read it anyway, because then often neither scrolling or resizing, or search will work, nor copy/paste, nor any normal functionality.

But what really annoys me these days are those Ads with Sound. Sometimes a random Pop up will open that I didn't even notice and will play some music...

Any site that, for any reason, starts making any kind of noise that I don't request needs an incredibly good reason not to be immediately closed and never returned to by me. Even people whose blogs play music without me asking them to get really on my tits.

Funny really as I can easily reach the power button on my speakers from where I sit.