The much awaited Chrome feature to block ads is going live from today. Google will be enabling Chrome’s in-built ad blocker from February 15 onwards. The feature is designed to block ads that are considered of poor quality, according to a Coalition for Better Ads. That includes ads that have autoplay video and audio, full page advertisements and flashing advertisements as well. Chrome will now be able to block all of these automatically.

“The Better Ads Standards are the result of public consumer research by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group focused on improving users' experience with online advertising. Over 40,000 internet users in North America and Europe participated in surveys where they were shown common ad experiences and asked to evaluate how intrusive the experiences were. The most intrusive ad experiences include prestitial ads (those full-page ads that block you from seeing the content on the page) and flashing animated ads. More details about the research and methodology can be found on the Coalition's website,” Google wrote in a blog post.

We’re encouraged by early results showing industry shifts away from intrusive ad experiences, and look forwarding to continued collaboration with the industry toward a future where Chrome’s ad filtering technology will not be needed.

In the meanwhile, Chromium blog has some technical details about how the blocking will work:

As of February 12, 42% of sites which were failing the Better Ads Standards have resolved their issues and are now passing. This is the outcome we are were hoping for — that sites would take steps to fix intrusive ads experiences themselves and benefit all web users. However, if a site continues to maintain non-compliant ad experiences 30 days after being notified of violations, Chrome will begin to block ads on that site.

The company will also be notifying site owners about these ads, if it finds them. Google is planning to block pop-up ads on the the desktop, while large sticky ads, autoplay video ads and those that play sound automatically will also be gone.