Google announced that in a coming update, their Chrome browser will become a lot faster. The update will push Google’s new data compression algorithm Brotli for this. According to the search giant, the algorithm shrinks the size of a web site down by 26 percent more than it’s current compression tool, Zopfli.
In Google fashion, Brotli continues Zopfli’s Swiss baked good naming scheme. In Swiss German, Brotli means small bread. While it’s not out yet, it looks like we may not have to wait that long for the new compression tool.
According to his Google+ post, Google engineer Ilya Grigorik said Brotli will be coming to the browser in the near future. Google first mentioned the data compression tool in a blog post in September. As the company put it:
“At Google, we think that internet users’ time is valuable, and that they shouldn’t have to wait long for a webpage to load,” the post said. “Because fast is better than slow.”
Continuing with its open-source code push, Brotli has been made available for any browser that wants to use it. Mozilla has even said it will use the code in Firefox. Though, it should be noted, that while this is coming to Chrome and Firefox, it will only work for https currently.
As Chrome’s reputation of being resource heavy, and not as light and fast as it once was grows, Brotli may help the company regain the title of having the world’s fastest browser. Back in September Google made enhancements to the browser when it released Chrome v. 45, which promised to decrease web page load times while being less aggressive on laptop batteries.
It has since made strides to be less cumbersome as well, including removing the feature to pre-load media files in the background. Not only that, but when pages go idle, the browser wipes out unused memory quite aggressively.
Have you noticed a boost in Chrome’s recent updates or have you gone to a different browser? Let us know in the comments below or on our social media accounts.
[button link=”http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/21/technology/google-chrome-faster/index.html” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: CNN[/button]
