It is misleading to say Chrome comes with a built-in ad blocker enabled by default, it is correct to say it blocks intrusive ads on a list of sites that are manually reviewed by Google team and marked as abusive. The ads on these sites could be annoying and also prevent you from leaving the site, the aggressive pop-ups and sticky ads also taken into account for a site before assigning an abusive status to sites, we now have got a list of abusive sites on which ads are disabled by default in Chrome and Vivaldi browsers.
The point here is we don’t know for which sites Chrome blocks ads automatically. Recently, Chromium-based Vivaldi which implemented Chrome ad blocker in their browser said, they didn’t receive the blocklist like Chrome did and confirms” the list is compiled by and originates from Google”. Vivaldi integrated the feature first into snapshot and later shipped it to the public with 2.6 version stable.
Vivaldi’s CEO Jon Von Tettzchner said in a blog post “the abusive ad blocker gives the browser access to blocklist that has been enabled by default”.
“The blocklist is hosted on our (their) end-to-end encrypted servers. It is updated from the server automatically by the browser and applies to intrusive websites without needing to contact the server each time” he reveals.
Vivaldi saves the list of sites that have the abusive status “failing”, locally on your computer in a file called “AdverseAdSitelist”, opening the file in Chrome browser displays all abusive sites that are blacklisted by Google.
If you’ve installed Vivaldi 2.6 on your computer, you can find this file here: C:Users[username]AppDataLocalVivaldiUser data and Vivaldi maintains one here and it is currently displaying the total number of blacklisted sites as 6854.
The file contains this information for every site: abusive status, enforcement time, filter status, last change time, report, reviewed site, and under review.
When we looked at these sites, it gave us an impression that the affected sites are pxxn, piracy sites and some are Blogspot sites with less content and contain intrusive, sticky and popup ads.
These site webmasters can see abusive experience report in search console that gives them information to act on the ads to improve user experience.
