Chrome's Lite Pages Speed Up HTTPS Webpages on Slow Connections (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Frustrated by web pages that never seem to load properly? Well, Google hopes to make them a thing of the past. Today, the company announced that Chrome on Android's Data Saver, a feature that automatically improves page loading using "built-in optimizations" and dedicated servers -- speeding them up by a factor of two and reducing data usage by up to 90 percent -- now supports encrypted HTTPS webpages. Previously, it only worked with unencrypted HTTP content. The latest stable version of Chrome on Android indicates in the URL bar when a lightweight version of a web page -- a Lite page -- is being displayed. Tapping the indicator shows additional information and provides an option to load the original version of the page. Google says that Chrome will automatically disable Lite pages on a per-site basis when it detects that "users frequently opt to load the original page."

Comments

JavaScript is the bane of the entire universe!

[Anonymous Coward]

The real cause: SHITTY JavaScript that pulls in half the world's code base just to render "Welcome to my shitty web page!"

If you're "web developer" creating such abominations, you are a turdbrain dumbass and probably too incompetent to jerk off.

Uh, so by default Google reads everything?

[luvirini]

I mean the default for chrome for android is that Google will read everything you browse?

Re:Uh, so by default Google reads everything?

[AmiMoJo]

No.

They have a database of commonly accessed content that they have pre-compressed on their own servers, such as Javascript frameworks. When the browser notices it needs to load one, it instead loads from the Google server or uses a locally cached copy. This happens even if the site said "load my copy", which usually means that the browser should re-download it no matter what.

Occasionally this breaks things because some sites modify their local copies, hence the need for the override.

This does not require any data about your browsing habits to be sent to Google, except in cases where you opt-in to sending it when you click on the override. It is explicitly opt-in, turned off by default.