Google proposes changes to Chrome that can weaken ad blockers

The web is indeed a place which can be a blessing with plenty of information on your finger tips, but it can also be an annoying place to be when many big ads try to distract you. This leads to many people installing ad blockers and other tools to inhibit the websites from tracking them. A survey had revealed that 71 percent of the respondents had used ad blockers or some other tools to control their online experience. Search engine giant Google makes a bulk of its revenue through ads and has also gone as far as to block ads on its Chrome browser on a small number of sites with particularly aggressive ads.

The ads blockers are actually third party software that can be easily installed as add-ons or extensions to the web browser. Other extensions help to modify the content on behalf of the users sometimes as a joke and other times it makes the pages more legible to add some extra features. Such extensions put the web browsing experience in the reader’s hand as opposed to the publishers.

Some of the proposed changes to the Google’s open source browser Chromium on which Chrome is based will break many existing ad blockers as well as other tools for blocking or changing online content. However it will still be possible to block the ads if the proposed changes have been incorporated in to Chrome but the developers need to rewrite their extensions on Chrome. At the same time many of the developers are protesting the new proposal and have argued that it can harm the users.

Google has said that the proposal is just “a proposal”. A spokesperson from Google said, “These changes are in the design process” and added that the company is working with extension developers to make sure that their extensions continue to work. The search engine is proposing to cut off extensions access to browsing history and offer an interface that can generate instructions for the browser to block or modify some of the content including ads.

Photo Credits: Medium