Chrome Beta for Android gets Translate and Compression Stats

In case you're using an Android device, there are now even more reasons for you to try out the experimental Chrome beta browser - which gives you access to some of the features that will come to the standard version later on. If you usually visit websites in languages other than your own, you'll like to know that the Google translate bar has now been integrated into chrome itself. Considering how annoying the regular bar was when popping up on a mobile browser... that alone would be worth it. But there is more - or, should I say: there is less.

Less traffic and data usage. The previous beta introduced an experimental data compression feature, and now you can see how well it has been doing with a nice graph of your data savings.

This feature not only reduces your device's data usage, but it speeds up loading as well, as it uses a SPDY proxy that is able to multiplex multiple request and response streams in parallel over a single TCP connection to your device (keep in mind that HTTPS secure traffic will bypass the proxy and won't enjoy the same savings... but will give you more peace of mind in securing your private data.

For an average web page, over 60% of the transferred bytes are images. The proxy optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings.