Chrome will stop resource-heavy Ads

[German]The Chrome developers want to stop advertising that consumes too many browser resources in the Chrome browser. The ads will then simply be stopped and unloaded.

The developers try to design the Chrome browser to be fast and responsive without causing users any harmful or annoying experiences. Therefore, in line with the Better Ads Standards, developers have recently taken steps against resource-hungry ads that most people find unacceptable. The announcement of these measures can be found on the Chromium blog.

Only a few Ads consume high device resources

Google's developers recently found that a fraction of a percentage of ads consume a disproportionate amount of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user being aware of it. These ads (such as those that mine crypto-currency, are poorly programmed or not optimized for network use) can shorten battery life, clog up already congested networks, and cost (the user's) money.

Ads that are too resource-hungry are stopped

To conserve Chrome users' batteries and mobile data plans and to give them a good web experience, Chrome limits the resources that a display can use before the user interacts with the display. When an ad reaches its limit, the display frame will navigate to an error page and inform the user that the ad has used too many resources. Here is an example of a display that has been unloaded

(Source: Google)

In order to determine the limits for discharging such ads, the developers took a close look at the ads on the web. In the future, Chrome will stop ads that consume more CPU or network bandwidth than 99.9% of all ads detected for that resource.

• Chrome sets the threshold to 4 MB of network data or
• 15 seconds of CPU usage in a 30 second period or 60 seconds of total CPU usage 

Although only 0.3% of displays exceed this threshold today, they represent 27% of the network data used by displays and 28% of the total display CPU usage.

(Source: Google)

Google intends to experiment with this feature over the next few months and roll it out in the stable version of the Chrome browser towards the end of August. The introduction over months should give ad designers and tool providers enough time to adjust the thresholds to prevent their ads from being blocked.