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Chrome's Ad Blocker Will Go Global On July 9 (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding across the globe starting on July 9, 2019. As with last year's initial ad blocker rollout, the date is not tied to a specific Chrome version. Chrome 76 is currently scheduled to arrive on May 30 and Chrome 77 is slated to launch on July 25, meaning Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers.
In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."
In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."
We already have ad blockers that block ALL ads. All ads are disruptive by design.
You can never have enough ad-blockers/tracking blockers running in your browser, as long as there is stull some memory left in your device to actually display the content you were trying to see.
I want to keep using a 3rd party extension with the important feature of NOT BEING INSTALLED BY DEFAULT
Simple.... Whatever Ad-Blocker is installed by default will be the ad-blocker that all the websites that want to show Ads spend their efforts detecting and making workarounds for.... workarounds like annoying prompts requiring you to "Whitelist" before being allowed to see the content referenced by the search link you clicked on.
Do those "standards" include websites not showing ads that originate from a network, or contain content, not under their control?
No. The standards ban eight distinct ad formats deemed unacceptably annoying in tests:
- pop-ups (other than exit intent pop-ups)
- autoplaying audio (other than preroll before relevant video)
- vertical ad density over 30 percent of article space
- sticky ad taller than 30 percent of the scrolling area
- prestitials (with countdown on desktop or at all on mobile)
- postitials with countdown
- animated ads that include flashing elements
- screen-height ads that appear as a float rather than inline, thereby pausing scrolling of the article behind it (a format that I haven't personally seen in the wild)
They do not discern whether the ads are served by the publisher or by a third party, nor whether serving them relies on surveiling the viewing habits of each visitor across numerous unrelated websites in order to infer each visitor's interests.
Currently, the standards page includes a pile of 404 errors with -archived-0 in URLs, but the links from the research page still work.
Not only that, if it blocks Facebook and other competitive ad networks, but not doubleclick/google ads, it seems like that's very much in Google's interest.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Google makes way too much money for something like this to block video ads on YouTube. I'm sure this is more of an effort to make it more difficult for people to identify which ad blocker they should use because there is no way this thing blocks YouTube ads.
It's an effort to push people away from using current blanket ad blockers by getting rid of the most annoying ads. If people follow through they will start to see more ads from Google as they will get rid of their ad blocker. I'm sure that's the thinking, anyway.
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