Chrome 52 for Android Rolls Out With 'Fast and Data-Efficient' Video Playback

After releasing it for Windows, Mac, and Linux users; Google has now released a stable Chrome 52 build for Android users as well. The biggest improvement with this update revolves around video playback. The browser will now load videos faster, apart from using less data and consuming less power during playback.

Chrome 52 for Android is rolling out to all users via an OTA, and it should reach all Android smartphones soon. For those who have not been prompted with a notification, can go to Settings > About > Check for updates.

With this update videos on popular sites like Facebook, YouTube and Netflix will load much faster, reducing buffer to a larger extent. To show just how fast the load time gets with the new update, Product manager At Google John Pallett has posted a video comparison on YouTube. The video experiment shows that the video starts five times faster on Chrome 52.

The new update also brings support for video in Data Saving Mode. Google claims that a user can save as much as 50 percent of data while viewing videos in Data Saving Mode. Of course, this works only on sites that are HTML5-based, which means Flash-based sites will continue to suck data and power while buffering videos.

Google has been discouraging the use of Flash since quite a while now, and has been pushing developers to switch to HTML5. The HTML5 software provides faster load times and consumes less power, which also helps battery life. As mentioned, Chrome 52 reached Windows, Linux, and Mac users last month bringing 48 security fixes.