After announcing their intent to build an ad-blocker into Chrome last year, Google is enabling their ad-blocker in Chrome on both the desktop and Android from today.
The ad-blocker in Chrome is going live on February 15th, according to the Chromium blog which outlines how the ad-blocker works and also which ads it will block.
The ad-blocker is a kill-all, so it will kill all ads on a site that run even a single ad that doesn’t adhere to the Better Ads Standards that Google and other vendors who are a part of the Coalition for Better Ads have come up with. There are 12 types of ads that are listed as ‘bad’, with four on desktop and eight on mobile, those ads include pop-up ads, flashing animated ads, auto-play videos, full-screen ads and more.
Once an errant ad is detected, the ads will be blocked, though users will be able to allow ads if they want. Google says the notifications will work like this:
For desktop users, the notification in Chrome’s address bar will look similar to Chrome’s existing pop-up blocker. Android users will see message in a small infobar at the bottom of their screen, and can tap on “details” to see more information and override the default setting.
Google has provided tools such as the Ad Experience Report in the Search Console to help site owners find out if their site is running ads which are considered ‘bad’. Google says that 42% of sites which were failing have resolved their issues since the 12th of February, so there’s hope that the web experience will improve.
The ad-blocker should be going live today, so keep an eye out for it.
