Intrusive web-advertising is everywhere nowadays. It is pretty much mandatory to have an ad-blocker in order to be able to normally browser the Internet without getting interrupted every five minutes by some nagging and obstructive pop-up, redirect or banner. This is also the reason why more and more browsers start to include built-in ad-blocker tools to help their customers have better web-surfing experience.
Unfortunately, online advertisers are very good at what they do and would exploit all possible potential methods just so that they could keep on spamming your screen with unpleasant promotional materials. Now, we ought to mention here that not all ads are the same – in some cases, website owners integrate ads within their pages as their sole method of supporting the website. Many of those ads are bearable and some users that have ad-blockers on their browsers even choose to disable the blocker for sites they want to support. However, in most instances, the ads you see online are just way too overwhelming and unpleasant. Not only that but they could also be potentially harmful to your web security of they are coming for unreliable sources. As we already mentioned, a dedicated blocker tool can handle most of that but apparently not everything. This is what leads us to our current topic…
Tab-Under Redirects
You might not be familiar with this term but you have more than likely already experienced such webpage/website behavior if you are a regular Internet user. Tab-Under Redirects is used to refer to a method of online advertising when a user visits a certain webpage and scrolls through it or clicks on something in it which leads to the opening of a new tab to which the said page gets transferred. At the same time, the initial tab where the page has been opened, a new page gets loaded that normally has advertisement contents. Here is demo site created by Google that will give you a general idea of how Tab-Under redirects work.
This is a really sneaky method of web advertising for two main reasons: First, many less attentive users tend to fail to notice that their current page has actually been moved to another tab and that a new page has been opened in the previous tab. The second important thing to note regarding this advertising technique is that currently, ad-blockers seem to be ineffective when it comes to dealing with this. Therefore, even if you have an ad-blocker tool, you should still be on the lookout for such Tab-Under behavior as it can still occur. Most of the times the page that opens in the old tab shouldn’t be anything harmful but it isn’t impossible that it has potentially hazardous or shady contents which is why you must be very careful with such redirects.
Google Chrome project to implement Tab-Under blocking
So far, pretty much no browser has a way of handling this sort of advertising. However, Google Chrome might turn out to be the first one that will give us a way to block those redirects. Currently, the new feature is under development and there have even been three separate suggested methods as to how the blocking should be implemented in the browser.
- The first method that was proposed would show a warning sign on the initial tab before the new tab gets created and the page gets moved over to it.
- The second suggestion is similar, with the main difference that the warning alert would be displayed after the new tab gets created and the page gets transferred to it, while at the same time the original tab would get closed in order to avoid the loading of the new page.
- The third potential method was to actually improve Chrome’s ad-blocker in order to make it capable of blocking Tab-Under redirects.
Google eventually decided to go with the first suggestion as it would be the most effective and wouldn’t break the Back button of the page as it won’t be transferred to a new tab (which is what would happen if they went with the second option instead).
The new feature will first be introduced in Chrome Canary
As with most new and experimental features that are still under development for Chrome, the Tab-Under blocking is set to first get added to Chrome Canary – a version of the Google Chrome browser that has been designed specifically for developers and early adopters. Normally, there is no guarantee that if something makes it to Canary, it would surely get added to the stable Chrome version but w believe that the chances for this are rather high with the Tab-Under blocking feature it is something that a lot of users have been waiting for, for quite some time.
