Chrome For iOS Starts Inviting Users To Try Out Web Data Compression

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Do you use Google’s excellent Chrome browser for the iPhone or iPad? If so, you might want to update it and check it out: Google has just introduced a new feature to Chrome that can reduce mobile data usage by over 50%. But it’s invite-only, for now.

Similar to the work Opera has been doing in the mobile browser space for years, Chrome’s new technology optimizes images in a number of ways. For one thing, it takes all the JPEG, PNGs and GIFs on a webpage and automatically converts them to Google’s ultra-efficient WebP format, which can shrink them by up to 60%. They also strip out all the cruft you don’t need: desktop specific JavaScript and CSS, HTML comments, whitespace and anything else you don’t actually need to render the page.

This technology was previously found on Android, and has been available on Google’s own operating system as part of the Chrome Beta for Android, where it has been since March. This is the first time the functionality is available on Apple’s platform, however.

If you do a lot of browsing on your webpage, it can make a big difference. Unfortunately, right now, not a lot of people are invited to the new Chrome feature. If you are one of the lucky ones, though, you should know just by opening Chrome up.

Source: Techcrunch

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