Now browse more on your smartphone without the fear of using up all your mobile internet data limits, as Google has started rolling out the data compression and bandwidth management feature to Chrome for Mobile web browser. Enabling this feature will help you to reduce data usage on smartphone or tablets and save money on your mobile internet data plans.
The data compression feature on Chrome can reduce your data usage by up to 50% while browsing the web on Chrome for Android and iOS. On to the technical side the data compression tool is powered by a connection to a SPDY proxy running on Google’s servers, paired with content optimization performed by open-source PageSpeed libraries. That means once the feature is enabled, every web page you access on Chrome will go through Google server’s where it will be highly optimized before displaying on to your browser. It’s way similar to how Opera’s Turbo mode works on their mobile and web browsers.
Chrome will only route HTTP traffic through the proxy where it will be optimized and all secure (HTTPS) requests will bypass the proxy and continue to connect directly to the destination. For an average web page, over 60% of the transferred bytes are images. The proxy optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings.
To enable this feature on your Chrome mobile browser go to Settings > Bandwidth management > Reduce data usage and toggle to On. From this page you will also be able to track how much bandwidth you have saved each month as you browse on Chrome.
In addition to the data compression feature, Google has also introduced the Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology to latest Chrome mobile browser which will protect users against malicious webpages, added Google Translate in Chrome for iOS and application shortcuts on Android which allow users to create shortcuts to their favorite websites by simply selecting ‘Add to homescreen‘ from the toolbar menu.
The new updated Google Chrome mobile browser app is being rolled out in phased manner over the next few days to both Android and iOS devices.