Google, in order to quench its thirst to stay updated, has taken a step further with its browser, Chrome, for mobile devices. The team present for handling Google’s daily affairs with Chrome for Android has plunged into an experiment that caters to a new data compression proxy feature for increasing the browser speed that are used by its counterparts like Opera Turbo and Amazon Silk. Though, it is optional in the current scenario, but can be used as a default as well.

Francois Beaufort, a developer and Google enthusiast had first spotted this latest feature to be incorporated in the Chromium that was released on Friday. Chromium is an open source web browser project that uses almost the same code and features as Google Chrome. The new features are often added there before spreading out.

According to the officials at Google, the feature is described as, “Reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers.” Thus the usage of less data could ultimately result in faster page loads.

On the other hand, Opera describes its Turbo feature as: “When Opera Turbo is enabled, webpages are compressed via Opera’s servers so that they use much less data than the originals. This means that there is less to download, so you can see your webpages more quickly.”

And, Amazon goes to the extent of detailing Silk as: “All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.”

However, Google tries to take a different bend and thus its implementation would be a little different. It has stated that the service would use the company’s SPDY proxy servers. SPDY, is not an acronym, instead a short version for “speedy.” It represents a protocol that is primarily developed at Google and improves the browsing experience by forcing the SSL encryption pertaining to all the sites, thereby speeding the page loads as a result.

The page load is sped up with the help of multiplexing, which is sending multiple streams of data over a single connection, assigns high or low priorities to page resources that are requested from a server and compresses the header information that comes with the communications for the resource requests and responses. Thus, Google has planned to broader its strategy to speed up the Web.

The feature, though in its development stage, can be enabled by following a few steps. Underlined are the steps that will help you achieve the feat.

  • Connect your mobile device or tablet to your PC or laptop and then turn on the USB Debugging and make use of the Android SDK.
  • You can run the following switch: adb shell ‘echo “chrome –enable-spdy-proxy-auth” > /data/local/tmp/content-shell-command-line’.

Wrapping Up

The above stated steps will help you run a nascent feature. Just awaiting the period when Google turns up with a full-fledged feature and runs it as a default.