For a company who makes a lot of money by selling ad spaces to companies looking to advertise their products, you imagine our surprise when we learnt earlier this year that Google could be baking in an ad blocker into its Chrome browser. We weren’t quite sure when the feature would be debuting, but it could be soon.
According to a report by TechCrunch, it seems that the native ad blocking feature has appeared in the developer build of Chrome for Android, which you can see in the screenshot to the right where there is an option to block ads under the Settings menu. The feature was originally discovered by Carsten Knobloch and later confirmed by TechCrunch.
Now clearly Google is not going to block all ads since that means they would be reducing the reasons for companies to advertise on their platform. Instead Google is expected to release a set of guidelines on the ad formats that companies should use, which are supposedly less “annoying” and won’t want to make users block them.
For example if every site you visited had popup ads and ads that automatically played music in the background, wouldn’t you find those annoying? In any case there is no word on when the feature will be rolled out to the rest of Chrome users, but presumably with it spotted in the developer build, we won’t have to wait much longer.
Image credit – TechCrunch
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