Google Chrome with ad filter built-in automatically blocks ads on sites that violate Better Ad Standards, now Google is ready to implement a solution in Chrome which unloads ads that consume device’s precious resources. The browser will unload
“ad iframes that use an egregious amount of CPU or network bandwidth.”
After seeing Firefox and Chromium Edge blocking Cryptomining scripts through Tracking Protection feature, Google is in all favor of “Heavy ad intervention”. With the new ad intervention in place Chrome apart from unloading crypomining ads, it also acts on ads that load large uncompressed files and videos that load without user gestures and ads that use JavaScript to decode video files.
The Heavy Ad Intervention Explainer page notes “A small fraction of ads on the web use an egregious amount of system resources. These poorly performant ads (whether intentional or not) harm the user’s browsing experience by making pages slow, draining device battery and consuming mobile data”.
Note: Google is testing Microsoft’s implementation to improve device battery life in Chrome, that is also available in Chromium Edge.
According to the Explainer page, an ad will be considered as heavy if not interacted by the user and meets the following conditions:
- Used the main thread for more than 60 seconds total
- Used the main thread for more than 15 seconds in any 30-second window (50% utilization over 30 seconds)
- Used more than 4 MB of network conditions to load resources.
When an ad is unloaded by Chrome, a message will be displayed within dev tools mentioning the reasoning for unloading and an intervention report will be sent to affected iframe. The feature to be supported on in Chrome on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and Chrome OS but not on Android Web View.
There is no ETA when heavy ads unloading feature will be available in the Chrome browser. And on a related note, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple have not given any signals to implement this in their Edge, Firefox and Safari browsers.