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.
Written by: Matti Robinson @ 23 Mar 2018 12:05
