In the wake of dozens of shady ICOs, Google is planning to take its steps to halt the spread of cryptocurrencies to a completely new level starting today. To that end, the company is putting a stop to the addition of any new cryptocurrency mining extensions for its Chrome browser starting today. What’s more, all of the extensions that are already on the associated Web Store will be delisted alongside the company’s new ban on advertisements pertaining to the digital currencies in June. The decision comes as a result of both the above-mentioned problems with new cryptocurrencies but also in response to the dishonest nature of some extensions tied to those. Namely, the company had allowed mining via extensions that were explicitly for that purpose and were advertised as such. The only ones that were not previously allowed were those that claimed to serve some other need but which ultimately were used for that purpose. Around 90-percent of mining extensions were not portrayed as being created to do so.
However, that’s not the only reason the company says it is approaching cryptocurrencies with such veracity. The search giant also included a chart which showed the profound negative impact the extensions can have on a CPU – and the performance of a given machine, as a result. The chart shows that after a user goes idle, the extensions can often overload the CPU to upwards of 80-percent capacity. Over short periods of time, that’s not really a problem but it can be if a user continuously is idle for long periods of time and can even shorten the life of the CPU or other components drastically.
The move is likely to be viewed negatively by at least some users, who may have intentionally been using mining extensions. However, this doesn’t really seem to deviate from the other steps the company is taking as alluded to above. In the meantime, extensions that utilize blockchain for other purposes will not be removed from the Web Store for Chrome. So nobody using those other extensions to get a bit more out of the browser needs to worry about their extensions being affected.
