Chrome Debuts Feature That Automatically Blocks Intrusive Ads

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Google Chrome is now able to automatically block online ads that are now deemed intrusive, and even annoying. The company, which itself is built on online advertising, is finally putting down the line on ads when it comes to ads that pop up, auto-play video with sound or cover the screen.

Most of the guidelines for picking out which ads can be said to be intrusive or particularly aggravating has been laid out by the Coalition for Better Ads, a collection of industry groups looking to improve advertisements both online and otherwise.

Google itself is a member of the group, and it is now adopting the coalition's criteria to enable their Chrome browser to automatically filter out the more offensive online ads that have become the norm these days.

The new system combines guidelines from the Better Ads Standards with a site evaluation feature that looks to work much like Google's dangerous site warning system, as Chris Bentzel, Engineering Manager for the company, explained in a blog post on Wednesday, Feb. 14.

The part where the coalition guidelines come in is on the types of ads that a research conducted by the group found to be aggravating for users. On the desktop browser side, the new Chrome filtering system will consider ads that launch a pop-up window, automatically play a video with sound, launch a prestitial ad that covers the screen with a countdown, or large ads that stick to the side or bottom of the screen.

On the mobile side, the Chrome ad filtering setup will consider the four annoying types of ads as listed for the Desktop, as well as postitial ones with a countdown, flashing animated ads, ones that cover the phone screen when scrolled over, or even ordinary ads that take up more than 30 percent of a mobile page.

Websites with these ads are given a short evaluation period, and if the site manager fails to address these concerns through Google's Ad Experience service, all their intrusive ads will be blocked on Chrome outright.