On Wednesday, Google flipped the switch to provide data compression in its Chrome beta for Android, which can speed up your browsing experience while also using less mobile broadband capacity. You actually have to enable the experimental function on your Android device first — here’s how to do it — before seeing the results.
Since sharing that information, I’ve been using the data compression function on my Galaxy Note 2. It feels like a slight speed boost to me: Google is using SPDY web connections, compressing images to the WebP format and removing unnecessary page data such as information on blank space. But it’s difficult to quantify how much faster or how much data I’m saving.
It turns out that Google has a little flag in Chrome to show exactly how much broadband savings the compression feature brings. I found out about it by watching Google’s Mobile Web Thursday’s video for developers.
To see your data savings once the experimental compression feature is active, simply type chrome://net-internals in a Chrome browser tab. On the left side of the page that appears, you’ll see a number of options; tap the one for Bandwidth and you’ll get a handy little tablet showing the data savings for the current browser session as well as for all time.
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