Google’s New Ad Blocker to Get Rid of “Heavy Ads”

Google is creating a new ad-blocker for Chrome that will specifically aim at ads which consume a lot of CPU and Bandwidth.

The tech giant says that its working on a way for Chrome to spontaneously obstruct heavy Ads that are demanding in resource and thus causing a sluggish behavior of the browser.

Despite Advertisements being a major source of revenue to the internet, they also slow down the browsing process and for this reason, Google sorts to solve the problem using “The Heavy Ad Intervention”.

Ads that are dubbed “heavy” are those that use main processor thread for more than a minute in total, the kind that uses more than 4MB network bandwidth to load resources and the kind that use main thread for more than 15 seconds in any 30-second window.

“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,” the Chromium document states.

When the Ad is blocked, it will be replaced by an error message that explains why it has been obstructed.

Heavy Ad Intervention allows you to disable or enable the ad-blocking feature while Disable heavy ad privacy tones down the ad-blocker’s built-in privacy protection.

These flags mean ad-blocking is currently in the experimental phase and won’t be rolled out before Chrome 80.

Google previously developed a built-in Ad blocker into Chrome that got rid of ads that didn’t adhere to the Better Ads Standards created by the Coalition of Better Ads.

Some of the offending categories include pop-up ads, prestitial adverts with countdowns, auto-play video adverts with sound and large sticky ads.

Google however experiences a dilemma with advertising, in the sense that though it is a major income generator – it is also able to spoil the browsing experience for Chrome User particularly when it compromises their privacy or affects browsing speeds.

Google has suggested a way to serve targeted ads to users without monitoring their online activity using tracking cookies.