Google Chrome to block heavy ads that use too many system resources

From zdnet.com

Chrome engineers are working on a feature that will unload online ads that are using too many system resources, such as network bandwidth and CPU processing power.

Work on the feature — named “Heavy Ad Intervention” — began last month.

“This change introduces a feature that unloads ad iframes that have been detected to use an egregious amount of system resources,” Google engineer John Delaney wrote in a code commit describing the new feature.

“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.”

When this happens, Chrome will find the ad’s iframe and unload the ad’s content, and then use the same technology that’s behind the Safe Browsing errors to show a custom message instead of the resource-intensive ad.

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