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Chrome IT

Chrome Will Start Blocking Resource-Heavy Ads in August (venturebeat.com) 49

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Google today announced that Chrome will soon start blocking resource-heavy ads. From a report: The company ads that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage because they "drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money." There are three possible thresholds an ad can hit to be blocked: 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. Google will be experimenting with this change "over the next several months" and will roll it out on Chrome stable "near the end of August."
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Chrome Will Start Blocking Resource-Heavy Ads in August More

Chrome Will Start Blocking Resource-Heavy Ads in August

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  • ..unless they're Google-sponsored ads (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:48PM (#60060054) Journal
    ..right?

    • Google ads don't hog bandwidth or CPU. They're reasonably sized static images or text content.

      So, no, there's no exception for Google ads. But it wouldn't change anything if there were.

      • Google ads don't hog bandwidth or CPU.

        Google owns just about every ad network there is. Perhaps you missed that memo. The first thing they did with their IPO money was to buy up the biggest ad networks. DoubleClick, AdMob, etc...

      • Google ads don't hog bandwidth or CPU. They're reasonably sized static images or text content.
        So, no, there's no exception for Google ads. But it wouldn't change anything if there were

        This was true in 2005. It is no longer so.

    • Re:..unless they're Google-sponsored ads (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:56PM (#60060088)
      Google-sponsored? How about Google-delivered.

      What Google seems to be planning to do, is to continue to deliver these malwarish advertisements through one of the ad networks in their monopoly of ad networks, and then block them for you if you use their browser, but not if you use anyone elses browser.
      • Yea that is a fairly good point. Itâ(TM)s likely just different parts of the giant org operating independently. But youâ(TM)d think if the company âoeGoogleâ (instead of the chrome team) had a real problem with resource intensive ads, that they could just, you know, not serve them in the first place. Still seems great for chrome to block them, but google ads could do its part also. ;)

    • If they rally wanted to block bloated resource hogs, they'd just block Chrome altogether.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Kisai ( 213879 )

        If they wanted to solve this, they would turn WASM off by default. Click to run only.

    • Probably not.

      They aren't doing this for your benefit. They are doing it because some large percentage of people run ad blockers. One of the things you notice when you run an ad blocker is the Internet gets way faster.

      In fact it gets so fast it's the first thing I notice when I run a browser without an ad blocker is "why is this suddenly so slow", not the ads. It's usually the speed that makes we twig "oh that's right, I haven't installed uBlock Origin".

      In case you didn't notice, Google doesn't like ad blockers. They've crippled them in Chrome. Ad blockers penalise all ad's - not just heavy ones that slow you down dramatically and make you realise how much you like ad blockers. This is just another attempt from Google to nudge you away from them.

  • My resources are priceless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:48PM (#60060056)

    EVERY ad is too resource-intensive for me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      If your attention is more expensive than money, I guess you'd prefer paywalls. Am I right?

  • Not much of a block (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:50PM (#60060064)

    There are three possible thresholds an ad can hit to be blocked: 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage.

    I really like the basic idea here, but fundamentally would this change any behavior? That's still a lot of time to get some mining in, when you are talking about millions of ads... that's still way, way past the threshold I think most people would find acceptable for ads.

    I would love to see this a tunable parameter to set these thresholds yourself - my thought is 500k of network, 1 second of CPU over 20 seconds, no more than two seconds total CPU usage. I feel like that's being extremely generous as it is to something that provides no value being given ANY resources...

    The high thresholds really make you wonder how Google would be impacted in terms of lost ad purchases if real limits were being set.

    • The high thresholds really make you wonder how Google would be impacted in terms of lost ad purchases if real limits were being set.

      Agree, but I think they're honing in on the absolutely highest usage ads to start so as not to break things. I'd hope they have tunable parameters and a much lower target in the future.

    • You are way too generous. I would set the limits to 5k of net traffic and 1ms of CPU, no execution of any kind of scripts, nothing moving or blinking, and a automatic 6-month ban for any advertiser that exceeds those. Since that is not possible, I rather accept the hassle of blocking all ads.

    • Google wants to pretend to block ads without actually blocking them. So this is the kind of thing you get.

    • I disagree: this will be a big help (Score:4)

      by jensend ( 71114 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @07:26PM (#60061436)

      Look, there are plenty of horribly coded video ads that devour much more network data than that, basically peg a full CPU core, and stay that way until you leave the site, even if they're not visible and even if the window doesn't have focus.

      Of course I'd prefer the limits be lower. But even just having any limit at all will force changes in behavior. Those designing ads have simply treated bandwidth and CPU use as completely unlimited resources. Forcing them to rethink that will be revolutionary.

      • Oh, my, yes. I had that discussion decades ago with a company that wished to run a lovely spinning, dancing video on the front page of their web site, back in the days of modem based Internet access. It looked lovely in the demo in the office. While it was applauded, I connected a laptop to a modem and then showed it over a modem connection.

        Fortunately, it was dropped.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Look, there are plenty of horribly coded video ads that devour much more network data than that

        Such as ads that fall back to GIFs [pineight.com] or CSS-animated JPEG filmstrips [pineight.com] if the user has blocked video.

  • 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period...... Can we have 1MB / 1second please
  • But with "non bloated ads" instead. There is conflict of interest and possible anti trust issues in Google deciding what ads should be allowed in Chrome. I think it is time Chrome should be split off in to a seperate Mozilla style foundation instead of having a monopoly dicate our browser content.
  • Think of how many times you opened up a page that was rendering slowly and your laptop fans kicked into high gear.

  • What are these ads you speak of? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Robert Goatse ( 984232 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @01:56PM (#60060388)
    uBlock + pi-hole and I haven't seen an ad in a while. If I could only figure out a way to stop those ads in the middle of a YouTube video, I'd be golden. And no I won't be extorted into paying to get rid of them.
    • uBlock should be doing this for you. It's possible that the Google is doing something to partially break it, but I don't see youtube ads on the machines I've installed it on. Also worth noting this is in Firefox; not sure if all uBlock functionality is present in the Chrome version.
    • uBlock on Firefox blocks all youtube ads.
    • One of the unfortunate downsides of Pi-hole is that it uses DNS, so it can be bypassed via hard-coded IP addresses or the application making a direct DNS call to a DNS server of its choosing. For these situations, OpenWRT is supposedly a better option for blocking ads because it can blacklist by IP as well as redirect requests to known public DNS servers to your own DNS/Pi-hole.

      I'm not sure about uBlock origin but obviously that won't work if you're using the YouTube app on a mobile device. Personally,

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      Slashdot: ads are shit and everyone who runs ads on their sites should die in a fire. If sites want money they should charge for their content, not force me to consume ads, invading my privacy, wasting my bandwidth, and increasing security risks of running bad ad code!

      Also Slashdot: no I won't be extorted into paying to get rid of them.

      How do you think YouTube should make money so they can provide their (extremely bandwidth heavy, and thus expensive to run) service?

  • How about letting us block auto-play videos while they're at it?

  • those 45 minute commercials to watch a ten minute video on youtube?

  • How will corporations continue to fuck us in the face if they can't deliver their high-quality, engagement advertisement content to us?

  • now web sites will say use an different browser to view just like the ones that say turn off your ad blocker to view

  • Just run a good ad-blocker in your browser and be done with them. Hell, I haven't seen ads in my browsers for over at least 10 years now.

  • By dropping ads which consume resources this will allow Chrome to hog even more of your machine's RAM and CPU.

  • google continue to willy-nilly make changes to how the internet works like they own it. switch to firefox and duckduckgo, while google still allows it!
  • I had no idea there were ads stealing your resources to mine crypto currencies. I guess I've been blocking ads for longer than I can remember.

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