Chrome May Add a Permission to Stop In-Browser Cryptocurrency Miners

Chrome engineers are considering adding a special browser permission that will thwart the in-browser cryptocurrency miners. The Chromium team’s Ojan Vafaishares shares one possibility: “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.”



The potential of having a browser permission to block JavaScript tasks that cause high-usage CPU operations for extended periods is a step forward. In another bug report filed in mid-September, Google engineers shut down the idea of blocking a miner’s JavaScript code at the browser level via a blacklist as being impractical. “We cannot, realistically, fingerprint and block this pattern of computation,” said Adam Langley, a Chrome engineering working on the Chromium project. “[W]eb sites will be able to outrun us by mutating the code. Blocking the loading of these scripts is thus something for extensions.”

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