Google Chrome tests feature that warns you about data-heavy, slow webpages

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Have you ever worried about the websites you’re loading when on a limited data connection? I sure have. With data plans being as limited as they can be, sometimes it’s best to restrain your browsing habits. To aid you in maintaining your data usage below an acceptable limit, Google Chrome is adding a new feature that alerts you when you’re on a data-heavy webpage. You can set it to restrain web pages to have a limit of 1MB, where you can then stop the page loading if it hits that cap. The feature is live on the Canary channel of Google Chrome.

Google Chrome tests Heavy Page Capping

To enable the feature, you need to navigate to the following URL in Chrome Canary.

chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-page-capping

Enable the feature and relaunch Google Chrome. If you set it to “Enabled (Low),” then websites exceeding 1MB of data will cause an alert to be shown. You then have the option to stop the page loading. The feature will be available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android when it’s fully launched. There is a catch with the feature though, and that is it appears to only work on sites which allow a “pause sub-resource request.”

Because it’s in the Canary channel, it could very well be improved upon in the future – or scrapped entirely. Google is constantly looking to improve its web browser. With a new UI on the way, we’re in for some big changes. We could see it add a user-defined value of how large a page can be, for example. We could also see it forcefully cut off a website once it exceeds a certain data usage, rather than asking the user. There’s a lot of different directions Google could take this new feature.

The addition of page capping is an absolute godsend for those on limited data plans. While websites usually don’t exceed a couple of megabytes, some can be filled to the brim with high-resolution images and GIFs. We hope that Google keeps this useful feature, and finds ways to make it even better.