Google is reportedly experimenting with delivering the web faster on Android devices through data compression. Over the weekend, Francois Beaufort noted the development on his Google+ page; Beaufort has consistently delivered early information on Google’s Chrome OS and Android efforts in the past. He says the end result would be similar to the faster web experiences found in Opera’s Turbo and Amazon’s Silk browsers.
Current Chrome for Android users can actually enable the test feature now, provided they know how to use tools found in Google’s Android SDK. This one line command turns the function on: adb shell ‘echo “chrome –enable-spdy-proxy-auth” > /data/local/tmp/content-shell-command-line’ although for it to work, Google’s proxy servers supporting Chrome for Android need to be in place and running. There’s no indication if they are at this point.
According to Beaufort, code related to the effort suggests Google will use SPDY proxy authentication. SPDY is considered to be a next generation web protocol to lower page load times and latency; Google’s testing of SPDY has shown up to 64% reductions in page load times. Google created SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) in 2009 as an experiment and support is now included in the Chrome, Amazon Silk, Opera and Firefox browsers.
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