Microsoft To Go To The Edge To Offer Adblocking In Its Web Browser

Tech giant set to add to ad-publishers headaches as eagle eyed Zdnet journalist, Ed Cotton, spots Microsoft’s new feature for its Edge web browser.

That’s right, adblocking may be coming to Redmond’s flagship browser in the next scheduled release for its Internet Explorer replacement.

If it happens, Microsoft will become another high profile tech firm that allows for adblocking software as standard.

This new feature for Edge would mean that web users would no longer need the 3^rd party extension AdBlock or AdBlock Plus, and would further annoy and concern publishers and website owners that rely on the revenue from online ads to survive.

Despite the fact that Google and Google’s Chrome web browser is the world’s preferred way to surf the web, Microsoft still have a substantial subset proportion of the market, especially among enterprise users.  According to Microsoft themselves, there are currently over 200 million devices running Windows 1o worldwide, and that number is growing. And of course, the Edge browser comes as standard with Windows 1o, whether users choose to use Bing or Google to do their surfing.

News of feature has spread quickly after Cotton spotted the new extension at a Microsoft Build conference, called “What’s Next for Microsoft’s New Browser,” – in one slide that seemed to show the next version of Edge would include adblocking capability when it is released.

While adblocking was for many years primarily only of benefit mainly to the tech heads of the world, in recent times, it has become much more popular among users.

The growth in adblocking has risen greatly in the last few years.  Toward the end of last year, Apple, brought the concept to most its ‘i’ users by allowing its latest version of its own browser, Safari, to carry third party adblockers.

In January of this year, a Mozilla Co-Founder, launched Brave, a web browser that came with adblocking built in and turned on as standard.

Apple’s entry to the adblocking world came as no surprise to many, as it still makes the majority of its profits from hardware sales, while Mozilla and its creators have always had a fairly egalitarian approach to the web. Unsurprisingly, Google, who rely on advertising for more than 90% of its revenue, has not released plans for its own built in adblocking software.

As Mr. Bott notes at the bottom of his article:

“It remains to be seen how the new ad-blocking features will work. But with new features expected to arrive in Windows 10 preview builds in the coming weeks, we probably will know soon.”

Time will tell.