Since a year, Google has been providing users with an option to minimize the data usage of Chrome web browser on both Android and iOS devices. Now, the firm is planning to extend this ability of reducing the data usage to the desktop users of Chrome as well. This is possible for the desktop users with the Data Saver extension.
The new extension is available in the Chrome Web Store and it is targeted at offering similar results as the mobile users by compressing the amount of data consumed. The screenshots that are listed in the Chrome Web Store show that the extension will reduce the size of some web pages by 50 percent. However, this extension is in the beta stage and so it might not render effective results right now.
Also, an employee at Google pointed out that users can see what is really happening behind this app by heading on to chrome:net-internals#bandwidth. This way, users can see the settings of Data Reduction Proxy such as primary and secondary URLs and most recent events. These aspects will let the users to carry out some manual debugging, if required.
The extension page’s description claims that the SSL and incognito pages are contrary with Data Saver. This means that Data Saver on the desktop will not be as useful as that in the mobile app. But this should not be an issue as most desktop users are not concerned about the level of data usage as in mobile devices. This will eventually help users connected to a tethered connection or hotspot to save some bandwidth.
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