Google Chrome Will Start Blocking Most Battery-Draining Ads

Google announced on Thursday that starting in August, it will automatically block annoying resource-heavy ads on Google Chrome that drain your battery life.

The tech giant announced the changes in a blog post, saying that these updates will “limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad.” The automatic blocking will be experimented with over the next few months with a Chrome rollout at the end of August.

Google gave some examples of these types of display ads as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed or are unoptimized for network usage.

The new ad blocking will work like this: When an ad reaches its loading limit on a website, the ad’s frame will navigate to an error page, so you won’t even be able to see the ad.

Google’s example of what an ad would look like if it’s reached its loading limit. Google

Google set the threshold to automatically block ads that use 4MB of network data or 15 seconds of central processing unit (CPU) usage in any 30-second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage.

Google seems to be in an ad-policing mood, since earlier this year, it announced that Chrome would start to block three of the most annoying types of video ads, also beginning in August.

The most intrusive ad types that will be blocked include ones that require you to wait five seconds before skipping them, ads that begin to play midway through a video, and ads that take up more than 20% of screen space.

In February, Google removed 600 apps from the Google Play Store that had too many annoying ads to crack down on its disruptive ad policy.

Apps that were removed reportedly had ads that resulted in poor user experiences or disrupted essential functions of people’s phones. Google said these pop-up ads could lead to people unintentionally clicking on them.

Google Chrome will start blocking most battery-draining ads automatically

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