March 2, 2013

Chrome for Android to Add Web Accelerator

I've always wondered when the Google Web Accelerator project will be resurrected. Now that Google has both a mobile operating system and a browser, it makes sense to find better ways to speed up browsing. A fast browser is not very useful if you have a slow Internet connection or you're limited to a few hundred megabytes a month. That's why browsers like Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are popular. Amazon Silk for Kindle Fire even uses Google's SPDY to make browsing faster.

Chrome for Android will add an experimental feature that uses Google's servers to compress pages. The purpose is to "reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers." For the moment, it's just another option added to the chrome://flags page. You'll probably find it in the next releases of Chrome Beta for Android.


{ via François }

2 comments:

  1. Web accelerators are a thing of the past and completely redundant in a world with high-speed broadband connections. Furthermore the Opera browser is not popular. It has less than 3% of the world market share.

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  2. This article talks about Chrome for Android devices. Many phones and connections across the world don't have high speed access (or cheap high speed internet access for the matter), nor do a lot of people around the world have wifi.

    In terms of mobile browser market share, Opera Mini has the third highest share with 12.7% as of Feb 2013 (via netmarketshare(dot)com) and this is supposedly ahead of Chrome itself. Opera Mini entirely works on nearly the same concept as the web accelerator, so I wouldn't be so quick to trash need for this option on Chrome for Android.

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