We’ve all been there: You’re in a quiet classroom or office, innocently click a link to open a new tab of news on your laptop, and boom! The audio from a tangentially-related auto-playing video is suddenly blaring from your speakers. Sure, you lunge to turn it off as soon as you can, but the damage is done, and everyone is glaring at you. But there’s hope: Developers know how much auto-play stinks, and so two major browsers will start muting all that junk for you. [More]
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Google Warns 1,000 Annoying Advertisers That They’ll Be Blocked On Chrome If They Don’t Shape Up
By 8.9.17
If you’re tired of auto-playing videos with sound, pop-up ads, and other annoying advertising tricks, well, join the club. Google knows how you feel, and is planning to start blocking those by default in both its desktop and mobile versions of Chrome sometime next year. But first, it’s giving publishers a grace period to clean up their acts. [More]
Google Rolling Out A Chrome Ad Blocker, Putting Web Publishers On Notice
By 6.2.17
You know that feeling of relief and serenity that comes with a web-browsing experience free of annoying popups, auto-play video ads, and screen-dominating interstitials? As predicted, Google is planning to launch a new ad blocker on Chrome next year in an effort to clean up the internet. [More]
Google Reportedly Planning To Build Ad-Blocker Into Chrome
By 4.20.17
Unless you work in the advertising industry, chances are you hate online ads that slow down, interrupt, or just plain ruin your browsing experience. That’s why the use of ad-blocking technology has soared in recent years. But would Google, which makes a mountain of money off web ads, actually build an ad-blocker directly into its Chrome browser? [More]
Why Is Google Blocking This Ad-Blocker On Chrome?
By 1.18.17
Ad-blockers might have started out as kind of a weird niche thing for techies and privacy advocates, but they’re now commonplace. Every major browser app lets you run plug-ins or extensions that can banish unsightly, privacy-compromising ads from your sight, and these browsers generally stay out of the escalating war between ad-blocking users and ad-blocker-blocking sites. Yet, the makers of one ad-blocker say Google has thrown their app out of the Chrome store, and disabled the service’s function in Chrome for all users. So what gives? [More]
New Google Accounts Now Opted-In To Ad Tracking Features By Default
By 10.25.16
Remember when Google’s default setting was to maximize your privacy? Well, Google doesn’t. The internet’s biggest advertising company has now quietly shifted its baseline privacy behavior, so you’ll want to watch out if you’re creating any new accounts. [More]
Chrome Will Start Giving You A Heads’ Up If That Site You’re On Isn’t Secure Enough
By 9.8.16
Google is on a mission to make using the internet a safer experience for even the least techie surfers. One feature at a time, it’s been trying to highlight not just when something is safe, but when it’s not. And soon, another one of those tweaks is coming to Chrome. [More]
Google Chrome Browser Now Comes With Chromecast Feature Built In
By 7.6.16
Before now, if Chromecast users wanted to send whatever was displayed on their internet browser to a TV, you’d have to have the Chromecast extension installed in Google Chrome. That’s changing now, as Google has baked the casting feature right into the newest version of Chrome. [More]
Google Chrome Has A Bug That Makes It Super Easy For Pirates To Purloin Streaming Video
By 6.27.16
Lots of things made our modern all-online, all-video era possible: Internet connections got faster, tech got cheaper, and so on. But the thing that made companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu willing and able to become household names in TV is a little invisible: it’s the ability to keep you paying for content. [More]
Google Chrome Will Disable Adobe Flash By Default By The End Of This Year
By 5.16.16
Google is continuing on its anti-Adobe Flash quest with a new effort to make HTML5 the default on its Chrome browser by the end of the year. [More]
Google Chrome Dethrones Internet Explorer To Become Most Popular Browser
By 5.2.16
If the technology world was a high school hallway, Google Chrome would be shoving past former prom queen Internet Explorer while wrinkling its nose like it smells something particularly offensive. That’s because Chrome is now the most popular browser, as it recently took home a larger share of the market than its rival for the first time. [More]
Microsoft Begging Windows 10 Users To Please Not Switch To Another Web Browser
By 10.19.15
Microsoft really really wants customers to use Edge, the web browser that’s replacing Internet Explorer. So much so that it’s apparently willing to beg Windows 10 users who switch their default browers to say, Chrome or Firefox, to pretty please just give Edge a chance. Just a teeny tiny chance. [More]
Google Drops “OK Google” Voice Prompt For Desktop Search
By 10.16.15
If you’ve been shouting at “OK Google” at your laptop all morning long, unsuccessfully trying to voice-activate a Google search, it’s not a problem with your computer. [More]
Quickly Find & Kill Whichever Open Tab Is The Source Of That Awful Sound
By 11.12.13
There’s a voice coming from your computer telling you about car insurance. A song is blaring from your speakers and it is awful. But you can’t find which tab it’s coming from, which browser window is the source of this unwanted noise. If you use Chrome, help is near: The new beta release will locate the sound and allow you to kill it dead, swiftly. [via Engadget] [More]
Gmail Briefly Goes Down, Everyone Proceeds To Freak Out On Social Media As Per Usual
By 12.10.12
It seems that noon is the magical time chosen by the Gmail elves to abruptly shut things down and throw everyone who uses it into a social media tizzy. We at Consumerist were right there with other Gmail users back during the Great Gmail Shutdown Of April 2012 when the site also crashed around noon ET, and today was like a giant flashback. Everyone make it back in once piece? [More]
Google Knocks Chrome In Its Search Rankings After Sponsored Blog Post Controversy
By 1.4.12
Google is slapping itself on its own metaphorical wrist after a bit of controversy over sponsored Chrome ads on various blogs boosted the site’s Google PageRank. The company announced they’ll lower the offending page’s rank for two months at the least. [More]
Google Teams Up With Samsung & Acer To Release Chromebooks In June
By 5.11.11
After the commercial success of its Android smartphone operating system and the growing number of people using its Chrome web browser, Google has announced that it has made a deal with Samsung and Acer to release a slate of PCs running the Chrome operating system. [More]
Google Wants To Sell You Web Browser Games, Apps
By 5.20.10
Imitating Apple’s concept of selling apps for devices through a unified storefront, Engadget reports Google announced it’s going to launch a Chrome web store that will offer a lot of stuff you can find on the App Store, including games such as Plants vs. Zombies. Engadget raves about a Sports Illustrated app: [More]
