Google Chrome is experimenting with a new data compression proxy feature in an attempt to increase its browsing speed. This feature has been used by other apps such as Opera Turbo and Amazon Silk. For now, Google will keep this feature optional, but it can be turned into a default feature if Google finds it worth keeping to help users with slow connections.
This feature was first seen by Developer and Regular Google watcher, Francois Beaufort, in a Chromium-build released on Friday. Chromium is an open source web browser project with similar codes and features to Google Chrome, and it is here that the features were first added.
Here’s how Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) describes the feature: “Reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers.”
Opera explains how the Turbo feature functions, “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.”
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Silk describes the browser “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.”
The Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) way of implementing will not be like others as it will use the company’s SPDY proxy servers, which is a short version of “speedy” – not an acronym. It is a protocol designed mainly by Google to enhance browsing by forcing SSL encryption for all sites and increasing the speed of the page loading.
This feature, though still under development, could be accessed by running the following switch ( connect a phone or tablet to a PC, turn on USB Debugging, and use the Android SDK): adb shell ‘echo “chrome –enable-spdy-proxy-auth” > /data/local/tmp/content-shell-command-line’.
