The ‘Lite Mode’ The aforementioned data saving mode of the Chrome browser on Android will be discontinued. Google justifies this with the price development for data volume.
Google shut down the support for the so-called “Lite Mode” of the Chrome browser on Android. Lite Mode is also known as “Data Saver”: It reduces the data size that has to be loaded to display a website. At the end of March, Chrome version M100 will be released, which will no longer support Lite Mode for the first time.
Google announced the step in a support entry for the Chrome browser. The update without the Lite Mode will appear on March 29th. As a reason, Google cites the falling costs for data volume in many countries. In addition, other improvements have been integrated into Chrome over the past few years that reduce data consumption.
“In the past few years, we have observed declining costs for mobile data in many countries,” writes Google in the entry. “Although we are saying goodbye to Lite Mode, we are still striving for fast-loading websites in Chrome.”
Data saving with HTTPS
Google called the “Data Saver” well-known Lite Mode for Chrome was first introduced in 2014. To reduce the amount of data, Chrome first uploads a large part to a Google server, where it is compressed. Only then are the pages processed by Google played out on the smartphone. This should save data volume and speed up the loading of websites – according to Google, this should reduce the data load by up to 90 percent.
For a long time, this process had the disadvantage that it only worked with unencrypted websites. Finally, in 2019, Google introduced the ability to also shrink HTTPS websites via the proxy method. This method was used with slow 2G connections or waiting times of more than 5 seconds before the first content was displayed. In Lite Mode there is also an option to completely disable image loading.
