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Anyone who has ever used an iPhone or iPad knows that when you scroll down a long webpage in Safari, the address bar disappears. It’s a neat little trick that increases the amount of content you can view at a given time. This feature is now live in the newest beta version of Chrome for Android.
The good news doesn’t stop there either. I’m sure you’ve heard of Opera Mini, the application that cuts your data usage by 90%. How does it work? You type in a URL, Opera sends that URL to one of their many servers, renders the site in said server farm, compresses it, and then spits it back down to your phone. That feature is also in this new version. To enable it you have to Settings, Bandwidth Management, Reduce Data Usage, and then tap on.
I’ve only been using the new Chrome Beta for a couple of minutes, but so far the compression feature is both a hit and a miss. It’s a miss because not much is being compressed. I’m “only” seeing a data usage savings of roughly 20%. That being said, it’s nowhere near as laggy as Opera Mini, which takes ages to send you the website you’re trying to read.
When will these two features come to the stable channel? If I had to make a bet, I’d say within two months. Google likes to turn out new versions of Chrome every six weeks.
