Not all web pages are created equal. Some are heavier than others and if you dig down more, you will notice differences in size, script execution, use of resources, or cookies that sites set on the user system.

While Internet users with fast broadband connections may not mind if a page exceeds a certain size limit, say 1 Megabyte, users on slow connection may very well mind as it may literally take ages to get those pages to display in the browser.

Google tests a new feature in Chrome Canary at the moment that warns users when heavy pages are opened in the browser. Chrome displays a notification to users if that is the case that gives them an option to stop the loading.

It is rather interesting that many Google-owned sites, YouTube for instance, are considered heavy by Chrome as Chrome will throw the "this page uses more than" notification when you open the sites in the web browser.

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The feature is only available in Chrome Canary currently. Since it is an experimental flag, it is possible that it gets removed again and is not added to Beta or Stable versions of the Chrome browser. It is also possible that the feature gets added to Chrome natively at one point.

For now though, you need Chrome Canary to enable it. Here is how that is done:

  1. If you are unsure about the version, load chrome://settings/help and make sure you run Chrome Canary 69.0.3493.0 or later.
  2. Load chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-page-capping in the browser's address bar.
  3. Set the flag to Enabled or Enabled (Low). The difference between the two is that Enabled (Low) has a 1 Megabyte threshold whereas Enabled has a higher threshold (that is not mentioned).
  4. Restart the Chrome browser.

For any page that is larger than the threshold, 1 Megabyte if you selected the low option, you will get a notification at the top that informs you about it and an option to stop the loading of the page right away.

You could just tap on the Esc-key on the keyboard to stop the loading or on the stop button if the loading takes to long. It would be more useful in my opinion if Google would display a progress bar of sorts to indicate the loading status as it would visualize the process to the user.

Classic Opera used to display the data automatically and Firefox users could install extensions such as Fission or Tab Progress Bar but the extensions don't work anymore and classic Opera has been replaced by Chromium-Opera.