Google's Data Saver extension helps Chrome load pages faster and lighter

Chrome's Data Saver mode has been around on Android for some time now, helping users load pages faster and eat up less of their data plan in the process. Today, Google's rolling out the same useful tool for Chrome on the desktop via an extension. Once installed, the Data Saver extension will keep track of which sites are plowing through the most data — and also detail how much of that you've saved by keeping it switched on. "It reduces the data your computer needs to access web sites using the same compression technology as Chrome for Android’s Data Saver mode," Google said in a blog post.

If you're wondering who might need something like this, just think about tethered smartphone connections and the like, where using Chrome at full blast on a laptop might pull down more data than you anticipated. It can be hard to meter just how much data is being used on the fly, so the Data Saver extension at least makes that pretty straightforward. And if you want to make pages load a bit faster on shared connections at Starbucks or wherever else, this can help to some extent with that, too.