I had never heard of this until your comment. I did a bit of research on this and have to say it is one of the least well advertised feature of any software I've seen in awhile- after a bunch of searching I found it on the bottom of the chrome privacy whitepaper[1], where it's referred to as "Data Saver".
This feature is actually pretty cool. It only hijacks http traffic (leaving https the same) but pushes that traffic over an encrypted channel to google. This has some pretty positive benefits if you're the type of person who connects to random wifi, although there's apparently a simple way for network admins to disable the feature (if they block a certain webpage form loading chrome will go back to working like normal).
The other major thing- and the reason I looked into this to begin with- is that it's opt in. So if you're like me and freaked out that google was spying on you after reading ikeboy's comment then you can relax now.
Opera did it way better. It wasn't long ago that in markets with 2G and Edge, Opera Mini was as ubiquitous as WhatsApp is today. They really executed it brilliantly. I rem browsing webpages with 1MiB or more being reduced to 40KiB.
I tend to go through every option of software when I begin using it, at least on a mobile device where there usually aren't too many settings. There are only like 10 settings on chrome mobile, and this is one, documented at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?hl=en
This feature is actually pretty cool. It only hijacks http traffic (leaving https the same) but pushes that traffic over an encrypted channel to google. This has some pretty positive benefits if you're the type of person who connects to random wifi, although there's apparently a simple way for network admins to disable the feature (if they block a certain webpage form loading chrome will go back to working like normal).
The other major thing- and the reason I looked into this to begin with- is that it's opt in. So if you're like me and freaked out that google was spying on you after reading ikeboy's comment then you can relax now.
[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...