JULY 2020 PCWorld 111The setting you’re looking for.
computer’s resources, and you can opt to
enable the feature manually today.
“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,” Chrome product
manager Marshall Vale said on the Chromium
blog (go.pcworld.com/cblg). “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.”
When an ad uses either 4MB of
network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage
within 30 seconds, or taps your CPU for a
total of 60 seconds across any period of
time, Chrome will shut it down, resulting
in the message below:
The ads take an outsize toll on everyone’s
resources. “While only 0.3% of ads exceed
this threshold today, they account for 27% of
network data used by ads and 28% of all ad
CPU usage,” Vale said. Oof.
Google’s going to be playing with the
new setting over the next few months. The
company plans to block abusive ads by
default in the stable version of Chrome
toward the end of August, ostensibly to give
advertisers some time to get their resource-
hungry ads under control.
If you’d rather stop these ads from
revving up your computer and draining
your resources today, simply head to
chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-ad-
intervention in Chrome’s URL bar and
enable the Heavy Ad Intervention flag
manually (go.pcworld.com/adit).An example of a blocked resource-draining ad in
Chrome.