Now that Google has pulled its terrible Chrome Installer for Windows 10 devices from the Microsoft Store, we can get back to talking about things that actually make sense. Google was rumoured to be adding a built-in ad-blocker to its Chrome browser since the start of the year, and we finally know when the ad-blocker will be available to all users.

Following the official, public launch of the Better Ads Experience Program by the Coalition for Better Ads, Google today announced (via VentureBeat) that the company plans on bringing its built-in ad-blocker to Chrome on February 15. “Starting on February 15, in line with the Coalition’s guidelines, Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a “failing” status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days,” the company said.

Chrome’s ad-blocker isn’t like your run-of-the-mill ad-blocker, though. Google makes a lot of money outs of ads through AdSense, so packing a feature on its browser that blocks every ad on the web is clearly not a good idea. The company is instead going to block ads on sites that go against the guideline set by the Coalition for Better Ads, as shown below:

Google also won’t immediately block ads on sites as soon as they stop meeting the standards set by the coalition, and the publishers will get notified through its Ad Experience Report once the experience of their sites starts declining. If the publisher does not comply with the standards within a month, it will get blacklisted by Google and users will stop seeing those ads on the publisher’s site.

As someone who doesn’t mind basic ads on websites, I think Chrome’s ad-blocker could be useful without hurting publishers and websites that I actually want to support. In recent years, more and more publishers and websites have (sadly) shifted towards obtrusive ads which ruin the browsing experience. Google cracking down on this with the built-in ad-blocker could really help weed out this type of ads from websites.

Tagged with Ad-blocker, Google, Google Chrome