Home Technology Google Chrome is going to start blocking battery and data-hogging ads

Google Chrome is going to start blocking battery and data-hogging ads

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Google is aware that Chrome is quite a resource hog on machines, which affects not only the user computing performance but its own performance as well. And one of the things responsible for Chrome’s issues is that of ads – something which the company announced, it will start to block.

While ads will always be around on the internet as a source of income generation for sites, they shouldn’t detract from the overall usage or performance of a particular web page. Sadly, not all ads are optimised correctly and can be a drain on the browser’s resources. Google has previously already started blocking video ads which tend to consume resources, but is now making more proactive measures to block more of them with more stringent measures to further improve resource usage, including how it affects battery life:

We have recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it. These ads (such as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage) can drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money.

According to Google, Chrome will block ads at the following thresholds: 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30-second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. Only 0.3 percent of ads surpass those thresholds, but the ads that do “account for 27% of network data used by ads and 28% of all ad CPU usage.”

It’s great to see Google getting even stricter with the measures they apply to ads draining resources. Will it be enough to improve Chrome resource-hogging abilities? Not quite, as they would need to rebuild the browser from scratch to solve its inherent resource handling problems. But then again, Microsoft has already done that with their Chromium Edge browser, so if Google wants to keep up, to might need to be willing to start again too.

Last Updated: May 15, 2020

One Comment

  1. Krabby Paddy

    May 15, 2020 at 13:22

    So ads will be charged for assault on battery

    Reply

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