Google announced that it will begin to roll out an update to Chrome that will make your browser speeds much faster.
The update contains a new data compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google first unveiled in September. It squishes the size of a website down by 26% more than Chrome’s previous compression tool, Zopfli.
Like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after a Swiss baked good. (Brötli means ‘small bread’ in Swiss German.)
In a Google+ post, Google engineer Ilya Grigorik announced that Brotli will be coming to Chrome soon, likely in the browser’s next major update.
“At Google, we think that internet users’ time is valuable, and that they shouldn’t have to wait long for a webpage to load,” Google said in a September blog post, when it first announced Brotli. “Because fast is better than slow.”
Google made the code open-souce, meaning it can be used by any competing browser. Mozilla, for example, says it will use the code in Firefox.
Chrome has been on a tear lately, adding features left and right that speed up your browsing experience.
In September, Google released version 45 of Chrome, which promised to make pages load faster and save your battery at the same time. As of version 45, when pages go idle, Chrome aggressively wipes out old, unused memory.
In a more recent update to the Chrome browser, Google decided it would longer allow videos to load in background tabs. You now have to click on a tab to load a video or streaming media file.
