Chrome will soon block cryptomining and resource-intensive ads

Given how it profits from ads, it's almost ironic that Google is pushing technologies and features in Chrome seem to block ads. The truth is that Google is only after misbehaving and malicious ads so that users will eventually develop a level of trust for good ads. When it comes to misbehaving ads, none can be more debilitating to a computer than a "heavy" ad that consumes CPU cycles and battery life. That's why Chrome's next move is to offer a heavy-handed option to prevent these heavy ads from loading in the first place.

As tools, advertisements in themselves are neither evil nor good but the technologies and practice used by certain agents have easily transformed them into instruments for doing harm not just to users but other advertisers as well. Ad blockers, for example, often wipe out all ads indiscriminately, including the ads that Google and its partners would like you to see. In order to promote what it labels as "good ads", Google is taking the almost ironic position of hunting down and eliminating bad ones.

Google has already equipped Chrome with various tools to block such misbehaving ads, the latest of which addressed ads with cross-site tracking. Its next trick, according to Techdows, is a "Heavy Ad Intervention" that will tackle resource-intensive ads, including those that play videos and, a new breed of web malware, cryptominers.

The latter has been the focus of browser makers like Opera who have noticed a spike in web pages, ads, and malware that hijack a user's computer resources in order to mine for bitcoins and its kin, without benefiting the actual computer owner, of course. These kinds of ads drain batteries and slow down computers, which makes web browsing a less pleasant activity.

Starting with Chrome 80's unstable canary version, users can have the option to block such heavy ads automatically. The notes for the feature indicate, however, that only those ads that users have not directly interacted with, like hitting play on a video ad, will be unloaded automatically. Google promises that it should have any negative effects on the browsing experience though it still remains to be seen which sites will break when this feature becomes available in stable Chrome releases.