Chrome will block the most annoying ads starting February 15th
Say goodbye to auto-playing music.
Back in June, Google announced that Chrome would start automatically blocking annoying internet ads in early 2018. You know the culprits -- ads that autoplay sound, force you to wait several seconds before the page loads, and otherwise ruin your browsing experience. But now we know when this will go into effect. On February 15th, Chrome will begin blocking these noxious ads.
As VentureBeat points out, this is date isn't tied to the release of a particular Chrome version: Chrome 64 comes out January 23rd and Chrome 65 is scheduled for March 6th. In that case, Google will likely turn on the ad blocker remotely, though it's unclear if that applies to every instance of the browser.
Google first vowed to block these ads after joining the Coalition for Better Ads, which spotlights these types of bad advertisements in its Better Ads Standards. By cutting the most annoying offenders out, the Coalition hopes that users will stop employing ad blockers, which stop all ads from loading, thus crippling advertisement-centric revenue models.
Per Google's Developer Blog post, on February 15th Chrome will remove all ads from sites that continually violate the Better Ads Standards for more than 30 days. Affected site owners can submit their site for re-review after the violations have been fixed.
