If you’ve ever heard your laptop mysteriously start screaming or feel your phone warm up while you’re browsing the web, rogue ads could be the culprit—and now Google’s acting against them.
The rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies sparked a rise in malicious ads that sneakily use your computer’s resources to mine Internet coins. Other ads can be poorly coded, or just plain unoptimized. Near the end of August, Google Chrome will start blocking nasty ads that vulture your 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 Mashall Vale said on the Chromium blog. “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.�