If those annoying ads interrupt your usual daily scrolling through the rabbit hole that is the internet when using Chrome, then help is on the way – Google is working on something that will make browsing the internet on its browser app much easier. The tech giant is reportedly working on a way for Chrome to automatically block heavy ads that are resource-intensive and tend to slow down the browser.
The new blocker will target ads that consume too much network or CPU in what the tech giant calls ‘heavy ads.’
- ads that mine cryptocurrency
- ads that load large poorly compressed images
- ads that load large video files before a user gesture
- ads that perform expensive operations in javascript, such as decoding video files, or CPU timing attacks
“This intervention unloads ads that are in the .1% of bandwidth usage, .1% of CPU usage per minute, and .1% of overall CPU time. The current numbers are 4MB network and 60 seconds CPU, but may be changed as more data is available,” reads the Chromium commit.
The new ad-blocker will remove resource-intensive ads after Chrome eliminates the ads for the entire page.
Two flags for this feature have been spotted on Canary builds for Chrome 80. One simply enables and disables the heavy ad-blocker while the other disables the ad-blockers built-in privacy protections for debugging.
When to expect
It will take a couple of months before this ad-blocker goes live but it won’t launch any sooner than Chrome 80.
If you’re using Chrome Canary for Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS, you can access the flags by typing chrome://flags/ into the URL bar and searching for ‘Heavy Ad Intervention’.
