Skip to main content

How to Enable Data Compression in Chrome for Android

Internet connectivity on mobile phones, or data plans are costly, and are often bandwidth capped or speed limited or both. This is why Opera Mini is so popular among mobile phone users. The Opera Mini browser employs a technology called Turbo that reduces bandwidth cost of the users by pre-rendering pages on Opera’s server and sending highly compressed version of the page to the user.

In the recent update to Chrome for Android, Google has added a similar experimental feature that uses Google's servers to compress pages before sending them to the user’s phone. The purpose is to reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google’s SPDY proxy servers. The proxy server handles the bulk of the content delivery process starting with DNS lookups, fetching pages and optimizing. Images are re-compressed using Google’s WebP standard, HTML as well as Javascript and CSS code is analyzed and unnecessary characters such as whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page are removed. The entire code is then compressed using gzip compression resulting in substantial bandwidth savings.

It should be noted that only HTTP traffic is routed through the proxy servers. Secure (HTTPS) requests will bypass the proxy and continue to connect directly to the destination. So on an sites that uses HTTPS such as Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc. you can’t save any bandwidth by compression. Furthermore, since DNS lookups are also performed by the proxy, it automatically enables Safe Browsing.

The data compression feature is now up for testing. To checkout the new feature, first install Chrome Beta for Android from Google Play, then type chrome://flags in the address bar and tap "Go".

"Enable" next to the "data compression proxy" experiment, and once enabled tap "Relaunch now" to restart the browser.

chrome-data-compression

To see how much data you've saved type chrome://net-internals in the address bar and tap on "Bandwidth" in the left sidebar. You can refresh this page any time to get updated stats on bandwidth saving.

chrome-data-compression2

via Chromium Blog

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used:
Post a Comment
Read more