That’s because a Google engineer says the company is nearly finished with a new compression algorithm called Brotli, which can crunch data up to 26 percent more efficiently than the currently used compression.
Chrome web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik took to his Google+ page to announce that the code has reached the “intent to ship” stage, which means it should be hitting stable versions of the browser very soon.
Brotli is an open-source compression algorithm, which replaces the current Zopfli. Google promises it will bring reduced battery use, faster page load times, and other benefits.
Why this matters: Speed is what initially drew people to Chrome in the first place, so Google must constantly keep improving the performance in order to stay competitive. Microsoft’s new Edge browser and the upstart Vivaldi both have won some fans, so this new toolset should help Chrome remain an attractive option.