Google Chrome on Android now lets you surf web without internet
By Tasneem Akolawala, 24 June 2018
Adding to the Chrome's idea to make the web work well for everyone, everywhere, Google on Thursday introduced a new feature that would allow users to access internet without a constant internet connection.
Launched for Chrome on Android users in India along with 100 other countries including Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil, the feature will allow users to surf web in areas with no or spotty internet connections.
Chrome will automatically download relevant articles, based on what content is most popular in your location when connected to the WiFi so that the user can download it and read it in areas with spotty or no internet connection at all. For users who are signed in, Chrome will also cache relevant articles based on the browsing history so that user can read them when there is no internet connection in the phone. The feature is available in the latest version of Chrome.
These are cached articles that Google selects for you based on your location and interests so sometimes they may not be the article that you'd want to read. But the feature can certainly prove helpful for those who want to do some reading while travelling or in areas where they know internet won't be available.
Google has been pushing very hard to make internet available in areas with poor or no internet connection. These efforts are mainly aimed at developing countries like India. Chrome's data saver is also one such effort from the company. The feature claims to save up to 70 per cent of your data. With data saver mode on, Chrome downloads the content that it assumes is relevant. How it works? When the Data Saver is on, most of the web traffic goes through Google servers before being downloaded to that particular device. Google servers compress it so less data gets downloaded to your device.
Separately, Google also has a dedicated data saving app-- Datally-- that gives you ways to control your data usage in phone. The app comes with features like ability to set daily data usage limit, set a guest mode to see how much data a friend uses, highlighting the unused apps that may be eating up your data, data usage history, WiFi finder on map and more.
Google's YouTube also has a offline viewing mode which allows user to save a video for offline viewing. However it is a manual process because user has to select the video and save it for offline mode.
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