Experimental Chrome feature warns for sites that consume a lot of bandwidth

Google has added a feature to the Canary version of Chrome for Android that warns users for data-heavy websites. When enabled, the browser will not further load the website once a certain threshold has been met. The user can then manually decide whether to continue or stop loading the web page.

(heavy page capping notification - source: XDA Developers)

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Mobile data plans are usually metered which means users don't want to waste their bandwidth on unnecessary page elements. Also, users are more likely to visit websites that load quickly. Therefore, Google has already launched several initiatives, such as its Pagespeed tool but also Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps.

Website XDA Developers found a new experimental setting in the latest Canary version of Chrome that should also assist user in preventing pages from consuming too much bandwidth. The feature is called 'heavy page capping'. Users who want to enable the feature can download the Google Chrome for Android Canary version from the Google Play Store. The same feature is also available on the desktop Canary version of Chrome, which can be downloaded here.

After the browser is installed, the heavy page capping feature can be enabled through a flag by navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-page-capping.

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Setting it to Enabled(Low) means Chrome will show a warning when the page size exceeds 1MB. Users can then decide to stop loading the page, or to resume loading the page. The latter however, seems to only work on websites that support the 'pause sub-resource request' feature.

The Canary version of Chrome contains the latest changes to Google's web browser. Each night a new version is automatically compiled from the source code. This also means it's not well tested and can be very unstable. For developers however, it's an opportunity to work on new functionality that Chrome implements and get it ready together with the release of a stable version of Chrome.

As it's an experimental feature, it's unsure whether heavy page capping will also end up in the final version of Chrome.

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