Data caps are one of the wireless industry’s least popular concoctions and they figure to get even less popular as mobile applications become more bandwidth intensive. Google, however, is trying to help you stay ahead of the curve with a new tool that it’s launched for its mobile Chrome browser for iOS and Android that it says can help you reduce your data consumption by up to 50%. The new feature is powered by an SPDY proxy connection that runs on Google’s servers and that Google says “optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG.” To enable it in your Chrome mobile browser, first make sure you have the latest version of Chrome, then click on “Settings” and then “bandwidth management.” From there you’ll see an option that reads “Reduce data usage” that you simply have to switch to “on.”

Prior to joining BGR as News Editor, Brad Reed spent five years covering the wireless industry for Network World. His first smartphone was a BlackBerry but he has since become a loyal Android user.