Google's tweaked the Data Saver in the mobile version of its Chrome browser, making images an opt-in luxury for those on slow connections.

“After the page has loaded, you can tap to show all images or just the individual ones you want, making the web faster and cheaper to access on slow connections,” Google says, claiming “up to 70 percent” of savings in data downloads.

For now, only subscribers in India and Indonesia – the world's second and fourth most populous nations respectively - are getting this facility. Google promises the service will arrive in “additional countries in the coming months.”

The enhanced Data Saver should be seen in the context of Facebook's announcement last week, on Mark Zuckerberg's timeline, that all of India can now access Internet.org's Free Basics un-metered subset of the web.

The two announcements contrast the two companies' approaches nicely: Google tries to make web access easier, Facebook tries to make access to a groomed subset of the web easier. Both, of course, only do so in order to feed ever-more personal information into the maws of their ad-generating machines. So enjoy your faster page load times, consumers of Indonesia and India. Google has so much more to give. ®