Google Chrome 64 Adds Parallel Download Feature to Accelerate Download Speeds

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Google Chrome browser on Android is constantly getting better with new features being added each day. Google Chrome 63 recently rolled out to the stable channel and added support for Android Oreo‘s smart text selection feature. We also recently found evidence that the browser would soon support HDR video playback and a custom download folder, but we also discovered another feature that is rolling out to Chrome 64 and above: parallel download. This feature accelerates download speeds by creating parallel jobs to handle the download.

This should theoretically increase download speeds in Google Chrome for Android, though I don’t have any numbers on how much it will help. According to the commit, the parallel download feature is activated when a download is active for longer than 2 seconds. The feature creates 3 parallel jobs to speed up the download. The commit mentions that the feature will be enabled for 100% of users running Chrome version 64 and above. That means anyone running one of Chrome Dev, Chrome Canary, or a nightly Chromium build will have this feature enabled by default, with Chrome Beta and Chrome Stable to follow sometime afterwards.

If you would like to test this feature out right now on Chrome Beta, you can enable the flag by copying and pasting this line into your address bar.

chrome://flags#chrome-parallel-download

This flag states it will “enable parallel downloading to accelerate download speed” and was actually added 3 months ago, but after undergoing lots of internal testing, it appears that the feature is in a state where Google feels it is ready to be enabled for all users. Parallel downloads will probably not make a major difference for most users who only occasionally download small files off the Internet, but you may notice a difference when downloading larger files such as ROM zips.

Let us know if you notice a difference with this feature enabled. I’m curious to see if it provides a noticeable improvement in the download speed in Google Chrome.