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Google Engineers Explore Ways To Stop In-Browser Cryptocurrency Miners in Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google Chrome engineers are considering adding a special browser permission that will thwart the rising trend of in-browser cryptocurrency miners. Discussions on the topic of in-browser miners have been going on the Chromium project's bug tracker since mid-September when Coinhive, the first such service, launched. "Here's my current thinking," Ojan Vafai, a Chrome engineering working on the Chromium project, wrote in one of the recent bug reports. "If a site is using more than XX% CPU for more than YY seconds, then we put the page into 'battery saver mode' where we aggressively throttle tasks and show a toast [notification popup] allowing the user to opt-out of battery saver mode. When a battery saver mode tab is backgrounded, we stop running tasks entirely. I think we'll want measurement to figure out what values to use for XX and YY, but we can start with really egregious things like 100% and 60 seconds. I'm effectively suggesting we add a permission here, but it would have unusual triggering conditions [...]. It only triggers when the page is doing a likely bad thing."

An earlier suggestion had Google create a blacklist and block the mining code at the browser level. That suggestion was shut down as being too impractical and something better left to extensions.

3 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's easy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Disable Javascript. There's no reason not to.

    Other than the fact that all but the most ancient website won't work without it anymore... unless its a flash website that is.

    Try browsing with scripting summarily disabled and let me know how it works for ya.

  2. Re:That's easy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Great, except many sites simply don't load right and you can't navigate and are filled with gibberish when you do that. I like that Chrome allows me to control JavaScript on a per-page basis but I wish there was a big button on the toolbar that would allow me to turn it on and off at a whim if I want.

  3. Once sites like that fill search results by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'd never go back to that site.

    So how will you deal with the frustration when you find that the majority of the top ten results from a particular web search query come from that site and others like it? It becomes tedious to add a dozen or more -site:domain.example terms to every single query. Google Search used to allow blacklisting a domain, but this feature has since been permanently discontinued. I found some promising browser extensions for users of Google Search on select desktop browsers:

    Google Chrome for desktop Personal Blocklist Firefox 56 or later Personal Blocklist (not by Google) Firefox 52 ESR or Firefox 56 Hide Unwanted Results of Google Search

    But what works for Chrome for Android, Edge, or Safari? Or for DuckDuckGo or Bing?