Google Announces Mobile Chrome Compression that Can Cut Data Usage in Half
January 17, 2014
By David Delony, Contributing Writer
Google (News - Alert) has announced it has added compression to the mobile version of its Chrome browser to help users save bandwidth on their mobile devices.
“Around the world, we’re seeing a similar trend towards more mobile browsing,” a post on Google’s official Chrome blog said. “That’s why we’ll be rolling out a new feature on Chrome for Mobile to help you reduce data usage and save money on your mobile plan. When enabled, Chrome’s data compression and bandwidth management can reduce data usage by up to 50% while browsing the web on Chrome for Android (News - Alert) and iOS. This feature also enables Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology which helps protect you from malicious webpages.”
The new compression feature is available on both the iOS and Android versions of Google Chrome. It’s off by default, but can be enabled in the settings menu. Users can see how much bandwidth they’re using with compression via a graph. The graph shows how much data is actually being used compared to how much data could have been used.
Google Chrome is not the first mobile browser to offer compression. Opera’s mobile browsers have also offered compression, even on the versions intended for the “feature phone” market.
Google figures the less mobile users worry about their bandwidth and overage charges, the more time they’ll spend using Chrome and searching on Google – and ultimately seeing more of Google’s ads.
Google has also added some new features to its mobile apps. iOS users will now be able to translate pages in Chrome using Google Translate just as they can on desktop versions of chrome. Android users can also create shortcuts on the home screen for easy access.
Google will roll out all of these new features in new versions of its mobile Chrome apps over the next few days.
Edited by Blaise McNamee