Tag: Chrome

The Google Chrome team has posted on Google blog some improvements that are available in the browser today with other new features that are in the pipeline.  Starting now, with a behind-the-scenes change, the browsers Data Saver feature works on videos.  Previously, Data Saver worked on text and images and when you had the feature enabled, Google would compress everything before sending it to your phone.  Essentially it acted like a proxy and the data savings were huge.  Initially the company rolled this out in India given the bandwidth constraints and costs in that country but the feature has now rolled out globally.  Back to this update, if you enabled Data Saver and view a site with a MP4 video, that video is now compressed before it hits your phone, saving you that extra bandwidth.

If you haven’t tried Data Saver, you can enable it on Chrome by going to Settings>Data Saver and enabling it.  I have been using it for months and I’ve had no ill effects on sites plus I’m saving on average 55% of the bandwidth the sites I visit would have required.  It’s pretty impressive.

The Chromium team has rolled out an update to Chrome for Windows that should bring a big speed boost to the browser.  In build 53 for 32-bit and 54 for 64-bit, Chrome now takes advantage of Profile Guided Optimization, or PGO (pronounced Pogo) compiling to give big speed improvements.  In their blog post about the update, the team reports that new tabs open 14.8% faster while Page Loads speed up by 5.9%.  Not familiar with PGO?  It is a compiler optimization technique that is designed to optimize performance.  Specifically, Chrome looks at what functions are being used and optimizes those functions to gain the speed improvements.  Essentially what it does is move rarely used functions out of memory and frequently used ones into memory.

Chrome for Android has been updated to build 53 and the update will be rolling out to your Android devices this week.  The update comes a week after the same major build was released for Chrome OS and about two weeks after it was released for Chrome for desktop (Windows, MacOS and Linux).  The updated build number is version 53.0.2785.124 for those keeping score at home.  The update has been released to the Google Play Store so it is a matter of when the OTA update comes to your device which will likely happen at some point this week.

If you are using the Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux machine, there is an important update that is out now for you to download.  The update, version 53.0.2785.113 has several security improvements in it but most of what has been fixed has not been released by the Chromium team.  As is often the case on these mid-stream releases (remember, they just released a big update last week), the team and their researchers found a significant security issue and they won’t release the details of it until a majority of users have updated to the build.  Once that happens, all the gory details can be found on the Chromium Blog.

That said, there are five named fixes in the update, two of which were considered high priority.

A new version of the Chrome browser for Android is making its way into the Play Store.  The updated build, version 53.0.2785.97 for those keeping score at home, has a lot of security updates and improvements that we’ve come to expect from these types of updates.  However, there is also support for Payment Request API which means that this build of Chrome supports Android Pay.  The Payment Request API is somewhat self explanatory but here is the W3C definition:

This specification describes a web API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to easily accept payments from different payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) will facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.

This means that you will be able to use Android Pay to pay for goods and services through the Chrome browser on your phone without having to type in a credit card number.  It should make buying goods online faster and more secure.

Users of the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux will want to grab the latest update rolling out.  Chrome Build 53 has been pushed out by the Chromium team and with it comes a whole host of fixes, security patches and updates.  Specifically, the build is version 53.0.2785.89 for those keeping score at home and it contains 13 high priority updates amongst the total of 20 updates.  Many of those fixes have to do with Heap Overflows and spoofing which the Chromium team has closed thanks to the help of contributors globally.  If you are running Chrome on your desktop, go to chrome://help and it will automatically start downloading the update for you.  Remember that you will need to do an restart of the browser to kick in the new version.