AfterDawn: Tech news

Chrome update tackles what is the most annoying problem on the web

Written by Matti Robinson @ 23 Mar 2018 12:05 User comments (4)

Chrome update tackles what is the most annoying problem on the web The internet is decades and decades old already, and more specifically even the web, the world wide web as it was once known, has come of age a decade ago, depending on how you define adulthood and start of the WWW.
Most of you probably still can think of a few problems with the undoubtedly revolutionary technology that has brought all information in the world to our fingertips. Perhaps you dislike the unintended feature that people seem to be creating their own echo chambers to feed their confirmation bias. Or think that social media is toxic, as some have pointed out with findings related to Facebook recently.

However, there might be one thing we can agree is not good, though. Automatically playing advertisements with sounds. Now Google has decided to tackle this issue once and for all.

Google, the player in online ad space, has announced that the upcoming update to its Chrome browser will block advertisement that are automatically playing video with sounds. The version number 66 will not be stopping all automatically playing videos but only the ones that might ruin your eardrums.



Obviously Google has noticed that there's no reason to make people hate ads entirely, and thus it might be more persuasive to keep people's ears intact, at least until they consent to the sounds.

The feature was originally meant to be included already on Chrome v64 which was released past January but for one reason or another it needed to be delayed. Google has however since January offered a manual block for sites with annoyingly loud ads.

We'll keep an eye when the new update will land and let you know. Version 66 is currently in beta.

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4 user comments

124.3.2018 03:25

I don't trust this at all. This is the same company that has been out-right censoring things in both their search engine and video platform for a long time now. And now people look at the browser automatically blocking things as a positive?

224.3.2018 21:40

I already tackled this problem with Adblock Plus.

326.3.2018 10:26

For personal use this means basically nothing to me; I only use Chrome when there is some website that is terribly written and only works on Chrome.

However, I do use Chrome at work. I asked why we run Chrome instead of Firefox and was told that it was because Firefox is open source and that's somehow a bad thing for security. Sure, chrome is mostly open source...but the built-in spyware isn't, so I guess that's better for security? That's all I can figure since a clean Chromium isn't approved. I was also reminded that we have Edge and Internet Explorer too...for that high security browsing! Hey, if it's useless on my end it must be useless to crackers too, right??? I could probably run FF portable, but then I have to worry about getting s**t from IT for running unapproved software...I already have a strike for using bulk rename utility to turn 4 hours of typing into a few clicks and a 20 second wait...plus all sorts of website violations for going to our own suppliers and customers, many of which are classified as arms dealers...because they are...and so are we. Ah, corporate logic.

So...if you have no control over your system, you can't unplug the speakers, and you are stuck with Chrome, then I guess this is a good feature.

426.3.2018 16:44

Enjoying Chrome since the beginning.

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