Are you a regular Chrome user? If so, you've got yet another reason to love the most popular browser in the world.
Recently, Google announced the pending rollout of another new feature designed to minimize the use of your CPU's resources.
The coming update will evaluate the resource load requirements of web-based ads on every website you visit.
If the ad is deemed to be too resource intensive, Chrome will automatically unload it, with no action required on your part.
It's a small change, but its significance cannot be understated. Resource-heavy advertising can very quickly degrade the performance of even the most robust system. That causes everything you're trying to run to work more slowly and less efficiently. That says nothing about the fact that it can quickly ruin your browsing experience and dramatically shorten your battery life if you're surfing on a mobile device or a laptop.
To put some specifics to the matter, Google will unload any ad that meets or exceeds the following thresholds:
- Uses more than 4 megabytes of network bandwidth
- Utilizes the main thread for more than 15-seconds in any 30-second windowUtilizes the main thread for more than 60 seconds overall.
If any of the above prove true, the ad in question will automatically get unloaded.
In terms of how big a difference it can make, consider the following: Although ads that meet or exceed the thresholds above only represent three tenths of one percent of all ads displayed, they account for a staggering 26 percent of all the network data and 28 percent of all CPU resources used to display web-based advertising.
That's tremendous, and shutting it down is a huge boon for everyone, including the advertisers. That is because it will prompt them to pay more attention to optimization.
The new capabilities will be rolled out in phases throughout the month of September (2020) with the release of Chrome M85. All you have to do to take advantage of the new functionality is upgrade your browser. That's good news indeed.
