The web is a great place to perform innumerable tasks like watching videos, keeping in touch with your friends, stay updated with the world news, to check your bank statement and so much more.
But it all becomes difficult when there is an unreliable cellular connection or a low Wi-Fi connection. Google is doing its best to alleviate such issues by announcing a new Google Chrome version for the Android-based devices, which will focus more on the internet connectivity.
The Vice President of Product Management, Google India, announced at a press conference in Delhi, India, that they wish to make Chrome a better place so that the users can rejoice using mobile web. It was also reported that the new features of Chrome which include content discovery, downloads, and Data Saver, will help the users to do more on the web, regardless of whichever mobile network they are using on their phones.
Improved Data Saver
The Data Saver mode which was introduced to Chrome last year helps in speeding up the web browsing process by compressing the content of the web page through the committed Google servers. The text is presented in a lower resolution and the images are converted to the WebP format, which is highly efficient.
The improved and new Data Saver for Google Chrome is even more versatile. It can efficiently compress the videos. When the Data Saver is enabled, a typical MP4 file will take almost less that 67% of the usual data. Another intelligent feature the Web Light, which was launched, last year in Indonesia, has been knitted inside the Data Saver, which can now smartly strip off pages with unnecessary background elements and images.
Google reported that these improvements have all together resulted in faster page loading which is now two times quicker than the average time, with a 90 percent reduced data usage.
Offline Downloads
Not all the improvements for the updated Google Chrome are technical. The Offline Downloads feature which made its debut in early September for the Chrome developer edition, allows the users to download web pages, videos, and images in a nominated Downloads section in the Chrome menu, for viewing them later in an offline mode. If the internet connection is lost or interrupted, the downloads will be paused and will resume automatically when the network is re-established.
Changes for “New Tab”
Even the “new tab” action will be changing with the New Chrome. If a new tab is opened, it will currently surface the suggestions for the websites to visit. This will be soon superseded by a list of personalized articles, pages, and “the latest buzz from the web”. Google said that the suggestions will improve over the time based on likes and preferences like favorite websites, sports teams, etc.
Google reported that the improvised Data Saver is live and available for all versions of the updated Chrome browser. The remodeled “new tabs” screen and the Offline Downloads feature will be coming in a bit later, as they will be first launched on a Beta version before being rolled out to the stable channel of Chrome.
All these announcements were made as a part of the Google event on the occasion of the tech giant’s 18th birthday that was held in Delhi, India and focused on the connectivity issues. The other announcements included YouTube Go, an attenuated YouTube client, which is optimized for the unstable internet connections and allows playing YouTube videos even with a low internet connectivity and permits saving the videos in an offline mode; Google Station, a new service platform which provides software and hardware guidance to partners like RailTel for RailWire, to dispose and construct fast, safe, and reliable Wi-Fi hot spots with an allied login for the public; and Google Play client, that was updated with improvised download speeds.
The CEO of Google explained in an Open Edition writing in The Economic Times, that they are debuting all the strategies in India, because of the many issues Indians have with the internet connectivity, and because data constraints are a universal issue. He said that solving web issues for India is an inspiration for Google to come up with new innovations.
Would be best to drop new tab altogether, since it now supersedes settings preference for start page. After suffering with this demon for too long, I finally plunked a small Google icon on the Chrome toobar so that as the little fascist new page stubbornly shows up, I click on the Google icon as wipe it out! What a pleasure to get such as rapid, clean start up and be on my way. A tiny bit of patience and a quick click abolishes the little fascist. None of the remedies for getting rid of new tab’s take over of start up offered on the web seem to work. Just like Yahoo, it’s here to stay so find a simple way to click them both to kingdom Come and get on with your life.