Webmasters whose sites don't adhere to the Coalition for Better Ads
standards for display advertisement will have advertisement blocked on
affected sites in Google Chrome beginning February 15, 2018.
An
email by the Google Web Tools Team is sent out to webmasters currently
that informs them about the change provided that the site is registered
on Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools).
Chrome will stop showing ads on SITENAME on Feb 15, 2018. Violating ad experiences detected on mobile.
Google
systems have detected ad experiences on your site that may be highly
annoying, misleading, or harmful to users. To protect your site’s
visitors, on Feb 15, 2018 Google Chrome will stop showing all ads on
mobile unless the issues are fixed.
Google announced plans to integrate an ad-blocker in Chrome in June 2017.
The company designed the ad-blocker to block ads on sites that violate
standards the coalition agreed on. What this means is that it will only
block ads on sites that are in violation, and that it will block all ads
on these sites. In turn, it won't block ads on sites that are not in
violation.
Tip: The ad-blocking is already an option in development builds of Chrome.
The
ad-blocking is Google's solution to content blocking that threatens the
company's main source of revenue. The main idea is to block most of the
annoyances to limit the impact that annoying ads have on a user's
decision to install ad-blocking solutions.
The following ad types
or formats are in violation, and sites that use at least one of the
types or formats will have their ads disabled in Chrome on mobile:
pop-up ads, prestitial ads, pages with ad-density higher than 30%,
flashing animated ads, auto-playing video ads with sound, postitial ads
with countdown, full-screen scrollover ads, large sticky ads.
Webmasters who added their sites to the Search Console can open the Ad Experience Report
on it to see screenshots and videos of violations that Google found on
the site. Webmasters may request a review after they have altered ad
serving on affected sites to get the issue overturned and avoid having
ads disabled on affected sites in Chrome.
Google
gets more control over the ad industry thanks to the dominating
position of the company's Chrome web browser. Other advertising
companies need to comply, or have their ads disabled by the majority of
Internet users.
Closing Words
As a user, I think it is
long overdue that advertisement companies stop supporting annoying ad
formats and types. Google, the largest advertisement company in the
world, tries to address the threat to its very existence by implementing
ad-blocking into Chrome.
The new system may slow down the rise of ad-blocking software and systems, but it does not go far enough in my opinion.
For
instance, while video with sound is on the list of unwanted formats,
video without sound is not. The latter may not be as annoying but it
still is annoying and sucks up lots of bandwidth and CPU.
Google
does not address other issues for using content blocking at all on top
of that. There is the abuse of advertisement to distribute malware, and
the tracking of users. Both of these valid reasons for using
content-blocking are not addressed at all.
There is still not a single solution out there that offers "ethical" ad serving.
Accompanying every new web browser
version release is a flood of claims that it’s faster than anything else
on the internet. And why not? In a cramped market, where name value
matters and personal preferences reign, anything that can shift
attention for a few minutes is welcome. So with this week's drop of
Firefox Quantum, the latest incarnation of Mozilla's stalwart browser,
the company's boast about its new version being speedier than Google
Chrome was pronounced more quickly than, well, you can open a new tab.
Mozilla insists that Firefox Quantum's "crazy powerful browser
engine" makes the process of loading pages twice as fast as it is on
Google's flagship browser. It also claims that it's 30 percent lighter
in terms of memory usage. But is any of it true?
To slash through all the bragging and unearth some facts, I fired up a
series of benchmark tests and did some real-world investigation to get a
better idea of the performance of both browsers under typical usage.
All tests on Firefox Quantum 57 and Google Chrome 61.0.3163.100 were
performed on the same Windows 10 machine, a Dell XPS 13 laptop with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-7660U processor and 16GB of RAM.
Synthetic Benchmark Tests
First up in the regimen of synthetic benchmark tests was WebXPRT 2015,
a test that is made up of six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads
that cover a range of basic, everyday tasks. Firefox Quantum was the
winner here, with a score of 491 (from an average of five runs, with the
highest and lowest results tossed out) to Chrome's 460 — but that
wasn't quite the whole story. Whereas Firefox performed noticeably
better on the Organize Album and Explore DNA Sequencing workloads,
Chrome proved more adept at Photo Enhancement and Local Notes,
demonstrating that the two browsers have different strengths.
Things were tighter still on BrowserBench's JetStream 1.1.
Described as "a JavaScript benchmark suite focused on the most advanced
web applications," JetStream 1.1 uses more than three dozen tests to
measure browser latency and throughput, and to provide a geometric mean
of the scores (which is what we're reporting). Firefox Quantum was
faster here, too, with a score of 183.1 to Google Chrome's 178.4.
You might think that Octane 2.0,
which started out as a Google Developers project, would favor Chrome —
and you'd be (slightly) right. This JavaScript benchmark runs 21
individual tests (over such functions as core language features, bit and
math operations, strings and arrays, and more) and combines the results
into a single score. Chrome's was 35,622 to Firefox's 35,148 — a win,
if only a minuscule one.
Browser Start Time
Although you may frequently think about the boot time of your
computer (especially if it's older!), the start time of individual
programs tends to be overlooked more often. When you click on an icon,
you want it to open, and if it lags, you notice. (We're looking at you,
Photoshop — but you do a ton of stuff, so it's okay.) Given how simple a
web browser is, it doesn't seem too much to ask that it open
immediately.
The good news is that you essentially get that with both Firefox Quantum and Google Chrome. I used PassMark AppTimer
to measure the timing of opening and closing 50 windows of each
program, and I rebooted the computer before switching between them. With
an average time of 0.287 seconds, Firefox again won. But since Chrome
averaged 0.302 seconds, you don't have to worry either way.
Memory Usage
If there's a natural enemy of web-browser performance, it's RAM
usage. More or less since their advent, web browsers have tended to
gobble up memory resources and compound the problem with each new tab or
window you open. But although the gradual uptick of RAM amounts in most
computers has mitigated this problem somewhat, it is still a problem —
and something you want to be aware of.
In order to determine which browser (if either) was less of a
mud-wallowing memory hog, I gathered together a list of 10 popular
websites, including our own Tom's Guide and Laptop; CNN and ESPN;
Facebook and Twitter; and others. I then opened them all in individual
tabs within one browser window (with the YouTube tab playing a video),
and used the Windows Task Manager to monitor the memory usage after 5
minutes. (As I did previously, I rebooted the computer before switching
to the other browser.)
Again,
the results were close. Yes, Chrome used marginally less memory just
running its main app (an average of 126.3MB versus 145.3MB for Firefox),
and it averaged a lower amount of memory across all the background
processes it started when it ran (1,362.4MB across 13 or 14 processes,
as compared to Firefox's 1,400.5MB across a consistent six). It's worth
noting, though, that in two of our three tests, Firefox did finish
leaner, but in no case did it live up to Mozilla's claim that Quantum
consumes "roughly 30 percent less RAM than Chrome."
The news changed a bit when more tabs were involved. With 30 tabs
open, Firefox Quantum averaged 3,883MB of RAM from six processes and
Chrome averaged 4,151.3MB from 34. As Mozilla touts Quantum's facility
with multiple tabs, this is good to know, though Firefox was more
sluggish keeping up with multiple simultaneous YouTube video streams.
(Both browsers flipped through and closed tabs snappily.)
Is Firefox Quantum Faster Than Chrome?
Firefox Quantum delivers on the spirit of Mozilla's promises. It did
demonstrate speed increases, albeit ones that were generally modest and
intermittent, and memory savings that were primarily noticeable only
with loads of active tabs. What this proves, though, is that no matter
which browser you choose, you're getting one that's decently fast and
capable when both handle all of the content you're likely to encounter
during your regular surfing sessions. And that, more than performance
that's a tad better here or there, is what matters most.
