Report : Google Testing Data Compression To Speed Up Chrome for Android
Google’s Chrome for Android team is experimenting with a new data compression proxy feature to speed up browsing similar to the methods used by Opera Turbo and Amazon Silk. The feature is currently optional but could one day be flipped on by default if Google deems it ready, significantly helping those on slow connections.
The latest build of Chromium, the open source browser project which Chrome is built upon, sports this new functionality. The feature was first spotted by developer Francois Beaufort, who talked about it in a Google+ post.
“Reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers,” Google describes the feature.
The feature is still in early testing, users can enable it in Chrome for Android via a command line flag, which means they’ll need to be able to run a command like shell on their phones, either remotely via adb or via a terminal emulator on the device.
It’s unclear whether the technology actually works at this point or whether it’s just a placeholder.
There are several ways in which Google could lighten the load on the connection and speed up website loading. For one, as the name suggests, Chrome will connect to the Google cloud via SPDY, reducing some of the overhead.
What’s more, using the proxy means that Chrome will connect to the closest Google data center rather than to a server which may be halfway around the world. Popular websites would also be cached by Google ensuring faster load times.
Both Opera Turbo and Silk use pre-processing on their respective company’s servers to optimize a web page, reducing the amount of data that is sent to the browser by compression and other methods.
[TNW]
