So my laptop fan has been sounding like a tiny jet engine every time I leave a browser tab open on pretty much any news site, and it turns out I'm not crazy and it's not (just) my three-year-old MacBook Air dying. It's Flash ads. Specifically the auto-playing kind that sit in a sidebar doing absolutely nothing useful except burning CPU cycles and, apparently, my battery.
Google announced this past week that starting September 1st, Chrome is going to start automatically pausing a lot of that stuff by default. Not all Flash, if you're watching a Flash-based video or playing a browser game, that keeps running fine. But the ad units, the little animated banners that aren't actually the thing you came to the page for, get paused until you click on them. Chrome 45 is the version that ships with this baked in, and honestly it cannot come soon enough.
I know Flash has been on its way out for a while now. YouTube switched its default player to HTML5 back at the start of the year. Steve Jobs wrote that whole letter about why Flash wasn't coming to the iPhone back in 2010, which at the time felt a little dramatic to me, and five years later turns out he was just right. But there's a difference between "Flash is dying" as a slow industry trend and actually feeling it on your machine every single day, and for me that difference is entirely about battery life. I work from coffee shops a couple days a week and there is nothing more annoying than opening my laptop, checking email, reading three articles, and watching my battery percentage drop like I'd been rendering video the whole time.
Forbes.com used to be the worst offender for me specifically, I stopped reading their site directly for a stretch last year because the ad load made the page basically unusable on battery power, fan screaming, page stuttering when you tried to scroll. That's a me problem and a them problem simultaneously, I guess. Anyway. This isn't a huge sweeping change to how the web works, it's a pretty narrow, sensible fix, and that's exactly why I like it. Google's not banning Flash outright here (that's a bigger fight, for a later day, and one they'll eventually win), they're just being smart about which Flash content actually deserves to run without you asking it to.
It also feels like a quiet admission that the ad tech industry has been abusing autoplay for years and nobody upstream was going to fix it voluntarily. Publishers aren't going to rip out Flash ads out of the goodness of their hearts when the ad networks are still selling them. So the browser has to be the one that draws the line. Chrome already does the click-to-play thing for some plugin content, this is really just extending that same idea with better heuristics about what's "central" to the page versus what's just noise around the edges.
Also, completely unrelated but I can't not mention it since it happened literally yesterday and everyone I follow on Twitter was losing it: markets went haywire Monday morning. The Dow opened down over a thousand points at one point, China's market had already cratered over the weekend, and Apple stock did this wild dip-and-recover thing in the first few minutes of trading that had people convinced for about ten minutes that something was seriously broken. I don't own individual stock in anything (index funds only, I am extremely boring about money), so I mostly watched this as a spectator sport, but it's a weird reminder of how tightly a lot of "tech news" is actually just "market news" wearing a tech costume.
Anyway. September 1st, Chrome 45, fewer ads chewing through your battery for no reason. Small thing, but I'll take small wins where I can get them lately. If you're on a laptop that runs hot, this is one of those updates you won't notice happening but will definitely notice once it's there.