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Chrome to Block Battery-Sucking Ads in August Update

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Chrome plans to start blocking resource-heavy ads that drain a lot of battery in August, Google announced today on its Chromium blog (via VentureBeat). Chrome will block ads that mine cryptocurrency, are badly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage.
We have recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it. These ads (such as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage) can drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money.

In order to save our users' batteries and data plans, and provide them with a good experience on the web, 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.
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Chrome plans to limit the resources that an ad can use before the user interacts with the ad, and when that limit is hit, the ad's frame will redirect to an error page to let the user know that the ad has eaten up too many resources.

Google says that it extensively measured the ads in Chrome, targeting the most "egregious" ads that use more CPU or bandwidth than 99.9 percent of all detected ads for that resource.

Chrome will have thresholds that allow for 4MB of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage before an ad is blocked. Just 0.3 percent of ads exceed this threshold, but today, account for 27 percent of network data used by ads and 28 percent of all ad CPU usage.

Google will experiment with the changes for the next several months with the intention of releasing the feature on Chrome stable towards the end of August.

Article Link: Chrome to Block Battery-Sucking Ads in August Update
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/14/chrome-blocking-battery-draining-ads/
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Populus said:
Good news for Chrome users! I’m better off using Safari and Brave as a second browser.
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Unless it supports Windows and Mac it isn't a reasonable replacement for Chrome. But... tell me about this Brave browser I have never heard of.
 
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4jasontv said:
Unless it supports Windows and Mac it isn't a reasonable replacement for Chrome. But... tell me about this Brave browser I have never heard of.
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Brave is, from my point of view, a good replacement for Chrome. I chose it after trying Chrome, Chromium, and some Chromium Forks (but most of them didn’t update the browser regularly). I even gave the opportunity -one more time- to Firefox, but I don’t quite like it (because of the lack of intelligent zoom and the poor integration within the macOS in general). [NOTE: This is my experience, and I respect others preferences and opinions, please respect mine]

By then, Brave already switched to Chromium engine, it was no longer based on Firefox (it was at the beginning), and I saw I didn’t need to install an ad-blocker because it has one built in. I didn’t need a script blocker because it has one built in. It is fast, it manages passwords (although I don’t use that feature) and its fast and is updated regularly. That was enough for me because my main browser is already Safari.

The only thing I don’t like of Brave is the poor implementation of Google Translate. You can install the extension but it is not the same as Chrome, you have to translate the webpage each time. But aside from that, I’m pretty happy with Brave.

As far as I know, it is not an open source browser, it belongs to a private company, but they say they take privacy very seriously. And honestly I prefer to share the data of my secondary browser with Brave rather than with Google. And yes, of course I use DuckDuckGo or StartPage as my default search engine.

All of this was at the end of past year when I decided to stop using any app and service from Google (and Facebook, and Twitter...).
 
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4jasontv said:
Unless it supports Windows and Mac it isn't a reasonable replacement for Chrome. But... tell me about this Brave browser I have never heard of.
Click to expand...
brave.com

Brave Browser Download | Brave

The latest version of the Brave browser with ad and tracker blocking capabilities is available to download here. Stand by for an entirely new way of thinking about how the web can work.
brave.com brave.com

Yeah, it supports Windows and Mac too.
 
Wonder if it can help with foxnews
I often get a banner telling me the page I am on is using significant resources and scrolls very slowly or hangs
 
julesme said:
Whenever I see an article about the battery draining abomination that is Google Chrome, I always have the same initial reaction, i.e., "Welp, I guess that's somebody else's problem."

Catch my drift?
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True, but I used Chrome on Win 7 for many years and it was always a big resource-hog. But maybe 16GB RAM and an SSD wasn't good enough?
 
Populus said:
Brave is, from my point of view, a good replacement for Chrome. I chose it after trying Chrome, Chromium, and some Chromium Forks (but most of them didn’t update the browser regularly). I even gave the opportunity -one more time- to Firefox, but I don’t quite like it (because of the lack of intelligent zoom and the poor integration within the macOS in general). [NOTE: This is my experience, and I respect others preferences and opinions, please respect mine]

By then, Brave already switched to Chromium engine, it was no longer based on Firefox (it was at the beginning), and I saw I didn’t need to install an ad-blocker because it has one built in. I didn’t need a script blocker because it has one built in. It is fast, it manages passwords (although I don’t use that feature) and its fast and is updated regularly. That was enough for me because my main browser is already Safari.

The only thing I don’t like of Brave is the poor implementation of Google Translate. You can install the extension but it is not the same as Chrome, you have to translate the webpage each time. But aside from that, I’m pretty happy with Brave.

As far as I know, it is not an open source browser, it belongs to a private company, but they say they take privacy very seriously. And honestly I prefer to share the data of my secondary browser with Brave rather than with Google. And yes, of course I use DuckDuckGo or StartPage as my default search engine.

All of this was at the end of past year when I decided to stop using any app and service from Google (and Facebook, and Twitter...).
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It is open source a few browsers have forked from it the most popular being Dissenter. I’d strongly just recommend Brave though over the forks.
 
NickName99 said:
I guess this is useful for the tens of people using Chrome without an ad blocker
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As amusing (and likely true) as that is, ad blockers shouldn't be third party browser extensions. Third party extension have the potential to go bad, and they require whatever additional resources are needed to support their use of public apis. I suspect that fewer people would run them if good enough protection was offered at the browser level.
 
I really don't see why anyone with a Mac would use Chrome. You might as send a list of everything you do online to include user names and passwords to Google. I went to Firefox and I can't see how it's any worse at browsing web pages, it allows ad blockers, and doesn't use so many system resources.
 
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B4U said:
brave.com

Brave Browser Download | Brave

The latest version of the Brave browser with ad and tracker blocking capabilities is available to download here. Stand by for an entirely new way of thinking about how the web can work.
brave.com brave.com

Yeah, it supports Windows and Mac too.
Click to expand...

I think he was talking about Safari, which, to be fair, supports Windows as well, but the Mac version is much better and more modern.
[automerge]1589507269[/automerge]
I use Safari, because Chrome is a resource hog. I’ve tried Firefox, but in my experience it’s slower than Chrome and Safari, and it has a messy UI
 
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