Google Chrome Lite Pages extended to HTTPS pages as well

Google’s Chrome Lite Pages, which help  improve the loading time for pages have been extended to ‘HTTPS’ or the secure pages well, from HTTP. Google confirmed the announcement in a blog post and says they are extending the performance improvements offered by Chrome Lite page to HTTPS pages and will provide direct feedback to the developers who want it.

The Chrome Lite Pages feature will be part of Chrome for Android’s pre-existing Data Saver feature, which can reduce data consumption by up to 90 per cent and load pages nearly two times faster, according to claims by the company. Users have to manually turn on Data Saver when setting up Chrome on their Android devices.

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According to a blog by Google, the new feature comes in to effect when the mobile network’s effective connection type is ‘2G’ or ‘slow-2G,’ or when Chrome for Android estimates that the page load will take more than five seconds to load at the current network conditions and device capabilities.

To show users when a page has been optimised, Chrome shows a Lite icon in the URL bar, denoting that a toned down version of the page is being displayed. Google has been showing Lite pages for news content as well, given these load faster.

Users can tap the indicator to see more information and to access an option to load the original version of the page, which would be the full version.

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Google also says that Chrome automatically disables Lite pages on a per-site or per-user basis when it detects that users frequently opt to load the original page.

For developers, Google says Chrome will not show a Lite page if the original page’s main HTML response has the ‘no-transform’ directive in the ‘cache-control’ header.

The blog post further adds that Chrome Lite pages are only triggered for extremely slow sites, and the company is recommending to developers that they should measure how well their pages currently perform over slow networks.