Google Chrome Kills Vibrating Ads

With the latest build of Chrome, Google has taken care of a particularly annoying type of ad that no doubt irks mobile users if they ever come across it. Vibrating ads are the type of ads that hijack a user’s smartphone and make it vibrate while they try to close the page. It’s bad user experience and you rarely find ads of that type on legitimate websites. The latest build of Google Chrome kills vibrating ads for users.

Google appears to be getting serious about tackling ads that have a negative impact on the user experience. A recent report pointed out that it’s even testing a native ad blocker for Google Chrome.

Vibrating ads make up of the Web Vibration API that enables web pages to make the handset vibrate. It was designed to be used with interactive content and games but some ad networks purposefully serve such ads so get the user to accidentally click somewhere so that they end up downloading malware on their device.

Chrome 60 takes care of this problem. Web pages will not be allowed to vibrate the phone until and unless the user taps on the page first. This means that users will no longer be taken by surprise by ads that pop up out of nowhere and make their phone vibrate uncontrollably.

Google is in the process of rolling out the latest build of Chrome for Android so it may take a while before it becomes available for everyone.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apps, Google, google chrome