Block abusive ads with Vivaldi 2.6, The end to Ad-Blocking in Chrome?

— Posted inMonthly Roundup — 3 min read

Block abusive ads with Vivaldi 2.6

With the latest version of Vivaldi, we joined the fight against abusive ads. We’ve added new functionality to block adverts that use abusive technologies and ads designed to be misleading. It stops ads from sites that are causing you problems, such as pop-ups that prevent you from leaving the site. The Abusive ad-blocker gives the browser access to a blocklist that has been enabled by default but can be turned off.

We got a lot of coverage and many of you shared our news! Here’s a small selection from Japan, Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, Spain, and the Czech Republic. 

Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings

The Abusive ad-blocker is a strong addition to our wide range of solid privacy settings. And we do get asked about our privacy settings a lot. This month we challenged one of our security experts to put it all on paper.  We believe that you should understand why we’ve picked the defaults we’ve picked, and give you the peace of mind you need online. And should you feel the need to tweak and change the defaults, this knowledge will come in useful! Share away! The more people understand what this all means, the better.

The end to Ad-Blocking in Chrome?

Recently, Google announced a change to Chromiums’s extensions system that would disable the API which makes it possible to block ads. For us, ad-blocking is a complex matter. The internet is built on free content, and you lose some of that if you take away the ads. That’s the reason we don’t provide a built-in ad blocker. But Vivaldi is also all about giving you the choice. We understand that many of you don’t like dealing with ads and we’ve happily delegated this functionality to some very capable extensions. The good news is that whatever restrictions Google adds, at the end we can remove them. Our mission will always be to ensure that you have the choice. Read our position on this.

Want to read more on the topic?

Vivaldi promises to restore third-party ad-blocking to Chromium

Google Is Putting an End to Ad-Blocking in Chrome: Here Are the 5 Best Browser Alternatives

Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome’s anti-ad-blocker changes, despite shared codebase | ZDNet

Read more about Google becoming ‘gatekeepers’ to the web in this Bloomberg article.

As always, a big thank you for helping us spread the word about Vivaldi! 😍