Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Data Compression in Chrome Beta for Android
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Today’s Chrome Beta for Android
update
brings your saved passwords and autofill entries from your desktop to your phone and tablet. This release also introduces an experimental data compression feature that will yield substantial bandwidth savings. This feature is powered by a connection to a
SPDY
proxy running on Google’s servers, paired with content optimization performed by our
open-source PageSpeed libraries
, specifically tuned for Chrome Beta on Android.
By using SPDY, the proxy is able to multiplex multiple request and response streams in parallel over a single TCP connection to your phone or tablet. When this new feature is enabled (enable the “Experimental Data Compression Proxy” under
chrome://flags
) the browser-to-proxy connection is over SSL, for a more secure browsing experience. In addition, only HTTP traffic is routed through and optimized by the proxy, so secure (HTTPS) requests will bypass the proxy and continue to connect directly to the destination. Furthermore, DNS lookups are performed by the proxy, instead of on the mobile device. Turning on this experimental feature also enables
Safe Browsing
.
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.
For a deeper dive into the technical details, check out our
whitepaper
in Chrome for Android’s developer documentation. The latest version of Chrome Beta for Android is available on
Google Play
(use the link, you won't find it in search)! We look forward to your early
feedback
.
Posted by Matt Welsh, Software Engineer & Mobile Web Performance Gearhead
Update April 10, 2013:
To enable this experimental data compression feature, go to “Bandwidth Management” in Settings and enable “Reduce Data Usage.” From the most recent Chrome Beta for Android
release
onwards, no need to look under
chrome://flags
.
Making the web speedier and safer with SPDY
Thursday, January 26, 2012
In the two years since we announced
SPDY
, we’ve been working with the web community on evolving the spec and getting SPDY deployed on the Web.
Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.
We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has
added SPDY support
, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to
implement SPDY
, and we're actively working on a full featured
mod-spdy for Apache
. In addition,
Strangeloop
,
Amazon
, and
Cotendo
have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.
Given SPDY's rapid adoption rate, we’re working hard on acceptance tests to help validate new implementations. Our
best practices document
can also help website operators make their sites as speedy as possible.
With the help of Mozilla and other contributors, we’re pushing hard to finalize and implement SPDY draft-3 in early 2012, as standardization discussions for SPDY will start at the next meeting of the IETF.
We look forward to working even closer with the community to improve SPDY and make the Web faster!
To learn more about SPDY, see the link to a Tech Talk
here
, with slides
here
.
Posted by Roberto Peon and Will Chan, Software Engineers
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