Google Chrome to Soon Get Faster and Less Resource Intensive With Brotli

If you think Google Chrome doesn't load webpages fast enough for you, that could change soon. Google's flagship Web browser will soon implement Brotli, a new algorithm that offers better compression, leading to lighter webpages and faster loading. You can test the feature on a Chrome beta build available via the Canary channel.

Ilya Grigorik, a Google's Web performance engineer, said that Brotli is ready to roll out to Chrome. The feature is of course especially useful for mobile users. The algorithm replaces the widely used Zopfli encoding technology. Google says Brotli is up to 26 percent more efficient at compressing webpages. To note, that it only works on HTTPS connections.

By curtailing the data size, Brotli also ensures that fewer resources are required to handle webpages, which further leads to less battery consumption on the device. Announced in September last year, Brotli offers the ability to pack the codes together more densely, which results in the reduction of the size of data being transmitted. Brotli utilises a modern variant of LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and a second order context modelling.

What's interesting is that at the time of the announcement, Google hadn't shared a firm rollout time frame for Brotli, adding that it would require a lot of underlying changes at both server and browser ends. Though as expected, Chrome is already read to embrace the new technology.

Google says that it will soon implement the technology in the stable Chrome Web browser release.

The Chrome team has been hard at work for the last few months, offering several new features and improvements to its Web browser. The company last month made 'Safe Browsing' enabled by default on its Android client, and in the same month, it gave users an option to significantly improve the data consumption. Last year, Google also announced that it has made its OS X Web browser lighter on resources.