Chrome is no doubt one of the most popular web browsers on our Android devices, but it appears that Google is intent on making the web browsing experience just a little faster than it already is. Taking a page from web browsers like that from Opera, Google has unveiled a preliminary build of its Chromium web browser that utilizes data compression. Here's how Google describes the data compression feature:
“Reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers”.
So essentially Google's data compression will do two things: provide more efficient security and speed up page load times. More efficient security comes from the Chrome browser using SPDY (the company's proxy servers) which forces SSL encryption for all sites. The speeding up of the load page times on the other hand, is done by multiplexing multiple streams of data over a single network connection and assigning high or low priorities to page resources being requested from a server.
Google hasn't exactly made this feature public yet, but it is available to test out for those of you Android 4.2 users who like to be ambitious and try things out. Hit the break for the full instructions on how to get this neat feature going.
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Go to Settings, About Phone.
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Find the build number
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Tap on the build number repeatedly about seven times
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Note that after the third tap, you'll see a snarky dialog that says you are four taps away from being a developer.
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After the seventh tap you will see a message that says “You are now a developer.”
Once all is done, the Developer Settings option (which you need to enable USB debugging) will again be in the device's Settings app.
This is one “feature” that I will want to make sure is turned off. I’ve always wanted a direct link to the target site. No middleman goofing with the data (and monitoring it) along the way.
Didn’t you read the article? It’s fully encrypted.
The encryption is between you and Google. Google’s servers see all of your web traffic (or else they wouldn’t be able to “optimize” it). I would hope that sites that are already secure aren’t directed through the proxy or else your passwords would be plainly visible to their servers as well. But I would be totally unsurprised if they are.
I’ve always despised proxy-based mobile browsers.
Wouldn’t that password and data issue already be the case on existing servers for all Internet traffic?
Ignoring the speed issues, for security this is probably only an issue when you’re on some wi-fi system you don’t own.
Well the more I think about it, I may have changed my mind somewhat. I still think it’s a bad idea to proxy traffic from sites that are already secure. But for non-secure sites, adding encryption would help protect your data from being monitored on public WiFi networks, or perhaps by your ISP. I wonder if Google would proxy data from secure sites. And if they do, I wonder if that could be disabled specifically.