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Chrome Will Whack Website Bait-and-Switch Tactics (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the fixing-things dept.

Starting next year, Google's Chrome browser will stamp out some shenanigans that send you to a website you didn't expect. From a report: You probably don't like it when you navigate to a particular web page and then your browser unexpectedly jumps to another page -- an action called a redirect and something the website publisher didn't even want to happen. With Chrome 64, in testing now and due to ship early next year, Chrome will block that kind of bait and switch, Google said. "We've found that this redirect often comes from third-party content embedded in the page, and the page author didn't intend the redirect to happen at all," Google product manager Ryan Schoen said in a blog post. Chrome 64 will block the redirect action and instead show an information bar telling you what happened. That's not all. Chrome 65, due a few weeks later, will squelch another unwelcome action that can happen when you click a link and the website opens in a new tab while switching the existing tab to a page you didn't request.

9 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. fix your ads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    how about instead fix your fucking ads that are rife with this shit so it isn't necessary to have this kind of feature or better yet auto block ad providers.

    1. Re:fix your ads by sexconker · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Fuck that. Just block the ads. The internet is a cesspool, and I'm not talking about the smut.

    2. Re:fix your ads by desdinova+216 · · Score: 5, Funny

      incoming remark about hosts files in 3...2...1...

    3. Re:fix your ads by sit1963nz · · Score: 2

      Yep, Ghostery plus a big hosts file seems to fix a LOT of things.

      Any pages that I get redirected to are manually added to the hosts file. I only ever get redirected to a site once.

      And any site that detects I am using an ad blocker and stops me from entering is more than welcome to do so, I am FAR MORE willing to go elsewhere than whitelist your site.

    4. Re:fix your ads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because it's not the ads, it's the browser.

      To give you an idea, If I have a website, and I have an iframe, I expect that everything that appears in that damn iframe to stay in the iframe. Yet time and time again script inside the iframe is able to do shit to document, window and top DOM's. This is a defect in the browser's own sandboxing and overflow clipping.

      If the developer console is open, it shouldn't even redirect at all. So good luck trying to stop a redirect when you don't know where it is fucking coming from because the browser won't sandbox the fucking thing.

    5. Re:fix your ads by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      Really? That's cool. Thanks for sharing that with us, it helps a lot!

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  2. Better idea... by green1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe google could quit giving top rank in it's search engine to sites that do this. I don't care if someone wants to make a site like this, I care that when I search for a useful site I get one of these instead.

  3. Re:Ghostery = advertiser owned... apk by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    What about https://pi-hole.net/ ?

    I'd rather have one device block everything via host names than having to configure every single device I own, some of them without that ability (ex: iPhone).

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  4. How about an absolute popup block? by satsuke · · Score: 2

    How about Chrome implement an absolute popup block, or at least a notification before opening one.

    Even to this day, with the "block popups" option ticked, there are sites that do a trick to launch additional windows.