Google’s Chrome browser is one of the company’s most popular products, it’s available on several platforms, the user interface is very simple and easy to use and it integrates many features like bookmarks and settings synchronization across many devices, page translation from several languages, Incognito mode so history information and cookies are not saved and in PCs, you can install a large number of extensions, providing additional functionality. Now, there’s a new Data Saver extension for the desktop interface made by Google, which might come in handy in various situations.
Let’s say you’re in a library or coffee shop with a less reliable Wi-Fi connection or perhaps you’re using a metered connection from your phone, in any case, it would be useful to manage your data usage and have pages load a little faster. The Data Saver extension for Chrome reduces data usage as pages are optimized in Google’s servers. These servers will compress pages before the content is downloaded, which results in less data consumption and they will be displayed faster. It is important to notice that pages accessed using private connections (HTTPS) or in Incognito mode will not be optimized by the servers. Users can easily install the extension from the Extension Gallery, it is supported by 52 languages and it is pretty lightweight at just 289 KB.
Once installed and enabled, users can see how much data they are using and the data savings from the optimized pages in a month. In Details, they can go even further and see their data consumption from additional periods of times like 1 hour, 3 hours, 1 day, 7 days, 30 days or 60 days as well as the data usage breakdown, so they can know which sites are the most consuming. This functionality has been available in Chrome for Android for a while now, which recently got better, and Google uses the same algorithm for the new extension. Users can activate the Data Saver feature in Chrome for Android by going to the Settings menu of the app, and it will also show a graph with the amount of data they have been saving with the compression of the servers.