If you use Chrome on your iPhone or iPad, then it’s a good news for you as Google is going to roll out further access to data-compression feature only for selected users. Back in March, Google announced the data-compression feature and according to it,
“For an average web page, over 60% of the transferred bytes are images. The proxy optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings.”
This feature allow users to save money (while browsing on 3G/4G) by using less data when surfing and it makes a big difference in monthly data bill. As of now, only a small number of users are able to access this feature but we expect that the number of users will grow in coming weeks. According to Google,
“The data compression feature is currently available to a subset of Android and iOS users – if you don’t see the option, stay tuned, as we are rolling out the feature over the coming months. If you can’t wait, you can install Chrome Beta for Android and enable the data compression feature right away.
The core optimizations, which allow us to reduce overall data usage and speed up the page load times, are performed by Google servers. When the Data Compression Proxy feature is enabled, Chrome Mobile opens a dedicated SPDY connection between your phone and one of the optimization servers running in Google’s datacenters and relays all HTTP requests over this connection.”