Quote:Google developers plan to add a feature to Chrome that will prevent advertising slots on a website from triggering automatic file downloads in users browsers.
 
"We plan to prevent downloads initiated from ad frames that lack a user gesture to prevent unwanted drive-by-downloads," Google developers said in a Chrome browser status page published today.
 
"Download doesn't make much sense with ads. It happens very rarely in practice and is also difficult to reproduce, which implies that a very small amount of ads are doing automatic downloads," Google said. "Blocking download in ad frames without user gesture will make the web less abusive and more secure."
 
According to a design document that Google also published today, an "ad frame" is "an iframe marked as ad by the Chromium ad detection infrastructure AdTagging." This basically means any iframe that Google believes to be an ad.