Earlier this year, Google Chrome developers announced about adding of a so-called heavy ad blocker. This is a mechanism that will detect and unload advertisements that consume too many system resources (creating unnecessary load on the processor, network bandwidth, and so on).
Then Google engineers wrote that “heavy” advertising can significantly reduce the battery life of the device, create an additional load on the network bandwidth, and as a result can cost the user money.
According to the company’s criteria, ads are considered too “heavy” in the following cases:
- uses more than 4 MB of network bandwidth;
- loads the processor for more than 60 seconds;
- over a period of 30 seconds uses the processor for more than 15 seconds.
That is, the new system is designed to block the mining of cryptocurrency in the browser, the download of large and poorly compressed images, as well as the download of large video files (without the user’s permission).
In September, Google developers began gradually implement the corresponding mechanism in the Chrome 85. Now Bleeping Computer writes that with the release of Chrome 87 (for desktops and mobile devices), more and more users are seeing the first results of the new mechanism.
Based on numerous tests conducted by Bleeping Computer on sites like the New York Times, the browser now does block overly heavy ads.
When an ad reaches the limit, Chrome automatically displays an error in the ad frame, informing the user that “the ad has used too many resources for your device, so we removed it.”
Also, according to the tests, Chrome blocks even its own ads, shown through AdSense, if it violates the given rules.
If you’re interested, you can test the feature on sample contents available on heavy-ads.glitch.me.
Let me remind you that 295 Chrome extensions injected ads in search results.
