[U] Your adblocker may be responsible for screwing up your Google Docs

Update: It looks like Google is, in fact, working on a fix of its own. Google Docs replied to a user on Twitter who is experiencing this issue. You can see the tweet below!

Hi there. Thanks for reporting. Google is aware of the issue and is looking into a fix. In the meantime, we recommend to disable any ad blocking chrome extension. We appreciate your patience.

— Google Docs (@googledocs) April 15, 2021

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A recent change to your adblocker may be causing Google Docs and in some instances, Slides to look really wacky. Some users via Reddit have reported that text is floating outside of their Docs, and scrunching up and overlapping in Slides. When asked about this, Google Drive’s Product Manager Remy Burger stated that all issues related to margins and paragraphs acting this way are a direct result of recent changes made to EasyList – the primary filter source that most adblockers utilize when compiling a list of websites that shouldn’t be allowed to display advertisements in the form of frames, images, and objects. In some instances, Docs users were completely unable to edit their files – a hard blow just a few days after a major Google Docs outage, right?

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Burger states that it’s up to adblockers to fix this issue and that it’s completely out of Google’s control. I’m not really sure how that’s possible, but okay. I’m not taking one side or the other, because I don’t know much about how changes to EasyList can affect Google’s services, but if that’s the case, just wow. It’s crazy to think that that’s even possible. In theory, could these types of changes cause something more malicious to happen visually on other Google services on the user’s end?

Adblock has issued a statement regarding this in response to a user – it’s being worked on. For the time being, those affected can simply disable their adblocker for that website, or go into the filter settings and whitelist or ‘allow’ drive.google.com. Some users reported that allowing docs.google.com worked instead, so I would add as many Drive URLs as you can including slides.google.com in order to resolve this problem until a permanent fix is issued on the EasyList end. I’d like to gauge how many of you are experiencing this, so please sound off in the comments if you’ve run into any weird visual glitches in Docs, Sheets, or Slides.