Chrome product manager Tal Oppenheimer explained in a blog post that people have the option to view a few images, rather than the entire collection of images displayed on one page. Users will have to enable Data Saver mode first. The browser is less frequently used on smartphones but was once very popular on feature phones when mobile data was slow everywhere.
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“Google says that this enhanced Data Saver “[makes] the web faster and cheaper to access on slow connections”. The company did not announce when the feature will roll out in the USA, but the update is expected to launch in more countries. Most users simply did not want to be bothered with info from the browser’s app when they were doing something other than browsing, so Google pulled the plug on the notification center. Therefore, Google is adding an option in the mobile Chrome browser called Data Saver mode.
Google warns that switching on data saver results in fuzzy images, or the occasional website not determining your location accurately, as well as difficulty loading secure pages over SSL. Opera Max can also block apps which consume data in the background (though not ads, given the important of its mobile ad network to the Opera business model). Images are resized and non-essential features disabled to minimise the amount of data required to successfully load a requested webpage.
Chrome 47.0.2526.73 contains a number of fixes and improvements – a list of changes is available in the log. For instance secure web pages (that start with https) and incognito pages load without any data savings. By reducing the load on the browser, pages load quicker and require less bandwidth to do so.
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More countries will get the new compression feature in the coming months, but Google didn’t specify an exact date.
