To spot resource-heavy ads, Google is using a thresholds-based system that will automatically mark them as heavy ads if users do not interact with them and they meet these criteria:
As Vale explained, even though only 0.3% of all ads displayed on the web will exceed these thresholds, they are behind 26% of all the network data and 28% of all CPU resources used by ads.
Among the ad behaviors this new feature will discourage, Google mentions ads mining cryptocy, ads loading large, poorly compressed images, and ads loading large video files before a user gesture.
Ads that perform expensive operations in JavaScript, including CPU timing attacks and video decoding will also be unloaded automatically if they are marked as resource-heavy ads.
While the feature is not yet enabled for users of the Chrome stable branch until the end of August 2020, users of Chrome Canary (now at version 84) can easily test it using the following flags:
chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-ad-intervention
chrome://flags/#heavy-ad-privacy-mitigations
As Google explains it, the new behavior is activated when you enable the chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-ad-intervention flag “but by default, there is some noise and variability added to the thresholds to protect user privacy.”
When disabling chrome://flags/#heavy-ad-privacy-mitigations, the heavy ad restrictions are applied purely according to the limits.
You can test the intervention on some sample content available on heavy-ads.glitch.me, and can also use it to load arbitrary URLs to test your own sites.
It is great to see google chrome updating their software to help protect its users. We recommend using uBlock Origin as the best ad and popup blocker for both beginners and professional users.
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