When Google releases Google Chrome 71 later this year the browser will block the ads on sites that it determines provide an “abusive” user experience.
According to Google, abusive experience can include email fee messages, unexpected clicks, misleading site behavior, phishing attempts, and ads or page elements that auto-redirect a page without user action, amongst other concerns. Google launched tools to deal with many of those issues in Chrome last year, however, the company says the tools didn’t go far enough.
“Last year, after hearing from Chrome users, we launched a set of user protections against ‘abusive experiences’— experiences designed to intentionally mislead and trick users into taking action on the web. These protections blocked pop-ups and new window requests from sites with certain abusive experiences like redirecting pages,” Vivek Sekhar, Google Chrome Product Manager said in a blog post.“We’ve learned since then that this approach did not go far enough. In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections, and nearly all involve harmful or misleading ads.”
Website owners will be able to track reported abusive experience on their site through a special report page. When an issue is reported, Google will give the site 30 days to correct the issue before it starts blocking the site’s ads in Google Chrome.
Chrome 71, with the browser’s new ad-blocking features, is expected to launch in December 2018.