Google to make Chrome less CPU intensive by removing resource-heavy ads
A potential boost in system performance with this new Chrome feature
- Last Updated May 15, 2020
If you’ve been using Google Chrome for a long time now due to its speedy browsing and all-round simplicity, you’ll know there’s one big drawback – how intensive it is on your CPU. There have been jokes circulating the web for years about how Chrome sucks up any juice your machine has and in practice, it actually does burden your internals by being such a power-hungry program but now Google is set to clean its act up.
After doing research on the ads being shown while on Chrome, Google has come to the conclusion that a small number of resource-heavy ads are the culprit, responsible for a quarter of all ad-related network data and CPU usage. These unoptimized and poor quality ads “drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money,” suggests Marshall Vale, Product Manager for Google Chrome and will look to put a stop to these in the near future to alleviate some of that CPU strain users face.
Testing for removing these ads is already underway and Vale implies that a full roll-out of a fix will be coming in August. This will enable Google to automatically block ads that exceed 4mb of network data, use 15 seconds of CPU usage in a 30-second period, and if they use a total of 60-seconds of CPU usage. To come to this conclusion on parameters, Vale said this:
“We targeted the most egregious ads, those that use more CPU or network bandwidth than 99.9% of all detected ads for that resource . . . 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,”
Google hopes that this will boost the performance of the browser and ultimately, decrease the load it has on your components.
Some businesses may be concerned that they will be hit by this restriction but this won’t come into effect until August at the earliest so there’s a number of months to get your ads optimized and safe for the new and improved Chrome.
All in all, this is a really great move by Google. Chrome has been somewhat a laughing stock for some time now due to how much of a CPU hog it is and with this change, that users won’t really be affected by on the front end, will certainly see the difference on the back-end PC performance.