Google Chrome is going to block websites that show ads asking you to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t. This includes things like fake download buttons that you see on ads, pop-ups that ask you to download certain programs or remove malware from your phones/computers and so on. The move is part of Google’s Safe Browsing technology, which you may have already seen, especially on torrent websites. For the uninitiated, it’s the red screen that opens before the website, warning you about possible malicious content on the site you’re trying to browse. While Safe Browsing on Google Chrome is nothing new, up till now, it was used to block websites that have been flagged as unsafe.
Back in November 2015 though, Google had started blocking websites that were using social engineering attacks to get users to install malicious software or asking for sensitive information. Google is expanding that today, to websites that mislead you into downloading something that you shouldn’t or at the very least, wouldn’t want to. Deceptive embedded content on websites have been growing, with even some of the best known websites online showing such advertisements. Here are the examples Google gave for the kind of advertisements it is going to block.
The change could be troublesome, to say the least, for webmasters, since such advertisements on your website can even come from ad servers, which makes them harder to monitor. In addition, they may not appear all the time, meaning you’ll have to refresh the website a few times before you can be sure that such an ad isn’t showing up. On the other hand, this will be a welcome change from the users’ point of view, since such buttons are often the reason for misclicks, which may lead to malware on your devices.