How To Reduce Data Usage Browsing Internet on Google Chrome

Data Saver, a data compression proxy service offered by Google, can help significantly save cellular data usage through Chrome browser on both Android and iOS mobile platform. This feature has been shown to reduce the size of web pages by as much as 50% and is now available as an extension for both Chrome desktop and ChromeOS as well.

You can add Data Saver extension directly from Chrome Web Store. When installed and enabled, you will see an icon showing up in the toolbar in Chrome, like below.

Clicking on it opens up a small window displaying brief information how much data has been saved through the Data Saver service. And you can see more detailed info, such as data usage breakdown or graph through a different data range, by going to Details.

Behind the scene, the core optimizations that reduce overall data usage are performed by Google servers. When Data Saver is enabled, Chrome opens a connection between your device and one of the optimization servers running in Google’s datacenters and relays all non-encrypted HTTP requests over this connection.

For security and privacy reason, not all content will be optimized through the proxy service.

• Secure connections (HTTPS) are routed directly from your device to the destination, bypassing the compression proxy. Therefore, they won’t be optimized.
• Navigation in incognito tabs bypasses the proxy as well, because the extensions are all disabled in private browsing session.

So, if you have a capped internet service at home why not enabling Data Saver extension on Chrome and start saving right away?