Web accelerators?

Speed up your mobile internet with a compression extension for your browser

AWe don’t know what happened to the Onspeed business specifically, but the market for so-called ‘internet accelerator’ products diminished as broadband connectivity became more widespread. We imagine that you probably stopped using Onspeed for the same reason as many others, which is simply that your internet connection became fast enough — although defining ‘fast enough’ is subjective. There’s nothing more complicated than that about the declining popularity of internet accelerators.

The concept is far from dead, however, and some mobile networks have embraced the idea to ‘manage’ the amount of data (or ‘traffic’) that flows over 3G and 4G connections. This is because these systems work by compressing, for example, web pages before they’re sent to a user’s smartphone or tablet, reducing network traffic and offering faster web browsing. Image quality might be reduced slightly — in the same way the JPEG image format sacrifices some detail — but this isn’t noticeable on smaller screens.

You can actually set up a similar feature yourself. The Android and IOS versions of Chrome have a datacompression tool built in, and you can add the same feature to the desktop version by installing a free extension. In the mobile app, tap the menu button (three dots) then tap Settings followed by ‘Bandwidth and Data Saver’, then slide the switch to On. In the desktop version of Chrome, visit www.snipca. com/20940 and click the Add To Chrome button to install the Data Saver extension.