14 DAY TRIAL // Google has recently announced that it would begin blocking heavy ads in Chrome browser in order to deal with the impact these could have on system and network performance and device battery life.
Google explains that these heavy ads can abuse system resources without the user knowing about it. In some cases, they are used to mine cryptocurrency or are simply poorly optimized or programmed, so Google no longer wants them to show up when browsing the web with Chrome.
So the browser will begin limiting the resources that an ad can use.
“In order to save our users’ batteries and data plans, and provide them with a good experience on the web, Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad. When an ad reaches its limit, the ad's frame will navigate to an error page, informing the user that the ad has used too many resources,” Google says.
Heavy ad blockers going live in August
The company has also announced the first thresholds that it’s going to use to separate the heavy ads from the ones that do no harm.
“We targeted the most egregious ads, those that use more CPU or network bandwidth than 99.9% of all detected ads for that resource. Chrome is setting the thresholds to 4MB of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. While only 0.3% of ads exceed this threshold today, they account for 27% of network data used by ads and 28% of all ad CPU usage,” Google explains.
The new heavy ad blockers will go live in the stable version of Chrome rolling out in late August, as Google says that it needs several months for testing, so additional information would be shared closer to launch date.