The Aggressive Ad Blocker
Google Chrome features a built-in mechanism called the “Heavy Ad Intervention” designed to protect your computer’s performance and battery life. When this feature is active, Chrome silently monitors the resources consumed by individual advertisements on a webpage. If an ad uses a disproportionate amount of CPU (e.g., mining cryptocurrency in the background) or downloads a massive amount of network data (e.g., an unoptimized, hidden video stream), Chrome will aggressively block the ad and replace it with a gray box stating, “Ad removed.”
For the average user, this is a fantastic feature that prevents malicious or poorly coded ads from slowing down their computer. However, for web developers, advertisers, and QA testers, this intervention is highly problematic. If you are building an interactive, high-bandwidth advertisement or testing a complex rich-media campaign, Chrome will constantly kill your ad before you can finish testing it, making development impossible. To allow your resource-intensive ads to run without interference during the testing phase, you must disable this blocking mechanism.
How to Turn Off Heavy Ad Intervention
You can prevent Chrome from killing resource-heavy ads via the experimental flags menu.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser.
- Type
chrome://flagsand press Enter. - A page titled “Experiments” will load.
- In the search bar at the top, type Heavy Ad Intervention.
- The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it is a dropdown menu.
- Change the dropdown menu setting from “Default” or “Enabled” to Disabled.
- Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.
Upon restarting, Chrome will stop monitoring and blocking advertisements based on their CPU or network usage. Your resource-heavy ads will now run to completion, allowing you to properly test their functionality and performance.