Google Chrome May Soon Warn You If A Website Is Too Fat

Thanks to faster internet and more mindful designers, websites are mostly quick to load these days. But on bandwidth-restricted and low-power devices, loading times remain a concern. An upcoming change in Chrome looks to warn you when a site is trying to stuff too much down the pipeline — and let you halt the process.

The feature is called “Heavy Page Capping”, as Martin Brinkmann over a gHacks explains and the description for the setting itself can be found in the Chromium source:

const char kEnableHeavyPageCappingName[] = "Heavy Page Capping";
const char kEnableHeavyPageCappingDescription[] =
    "Enable showing an InfoBar on data heavy pages that allows the user to "
    "pause sub-resource request loading on the page. Using the 'Low' option "
    "will reduce the triggering threshold 1MB.";

While not available in the Stable channel, you can check page capping out in Canary. Indeed, three options are available when you hit up chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-page-capping: “Disabled”, “Enabled” and “Enabled (Low)”.

It’s not clear how much it takes to trigger the non-low settings, but 1MB should catch large images and other bandwidth-intensive media. When it is triggered, you’ll see a warning bar appear below the address bar, accompanied by a “Stop loading” link.

Because the flag is only in Canary, there are no guarantees it will ever make it to Stable and even if it does, it might remain disabled. Still, I can see the benefits for mobile Chrome and laptops, where conserving data or power is paramount.

flag_descriptions.cc [GitHub, via gHacks]


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