Google"s effort to improve the browsing experience of users on the web has led to new policies based on the Better Ads Standards, the most recent of which was its announcement to block intrusive video ads on Chrome starting in August. On that same month, Google will also limit device resources for data-intensive and battery-draining ads.
The company announced today that it will set thresholds for resource-heavy ads beginning in late August in order to ease strain on your phone"s battery and network data. When these limits are reached, the ad"s frame will display an error page instead to let the users know it has exceeded its resource allocation.
Regarding the upcoming change, Marshall Vale, Product Manager for Chrome, wrote in a blog post:
"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."
Google says it will block ads that consume more than 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. The search giant notes that although "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".
The Mountain View-based company will test this new intervention over the coming months and plans to launch it on a stable version of Chrome in August.