Google Chrome to block ads that consume battery, network data

Google has been working on removing abusive ads from Chrome. It is now working on blocking ads which are resource-heavy. Google will integrate this feature on Chrome by August this year.

Google in a blog post said there are some ads which consume a good amount of battery and network data without the user’s knowledge. Most of these ads are those that mine cryptocurrency that can even lead to costing money for the user.

Google found that these abusive ads comprise only 0.3% of overall ads but they consume 27% of network data and 28% of CPU usage. For this test, Google set the threshold levels at 4MB for network data and 15 seconds for CPU usage in a 30 or 60 seconds period of total CPU usage. Google will now implement a way to restrict such resource-heavy ads on Chrome.

“Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad. When an ad reaches its limit, the ad's frame will navigate to an error page, informing the user that the ad has used too many resources,” Google said.

Google will first test this out for the next few months before rolling it out by the end of August. Google also said it is giving this time period to ad creators and tool providers to update their products to the new thresholds. At the same time, they can also refer here for more details on how Chrome is handling abusive ads.