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Google Chrome to add ‘Heavy Page Capping’ bandwidth usage alert on desktop, mobile

Chrome is seemingly always picking up handy new features, and recently it’s added a new option to help users keep track of their data usage while browsing the web.

Spotted by Chrome Story, the Canary release of Google Chrome has just added a new flag called “Heavy Page Capping.” This option is a simple alert which, when enabled, lets users know when a page is using up their data. The notification appears in the info-bar, also giving users the quick option to pause loading on that page.

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

Enable showing an InfoBar on data heavy pages that allows the user to pause sub-resource request loading on the page. Using the ‘Low’ option will reduce the triggering threshold 1MB.

By default, this feature is disabled, but there are a couple of options if you choose to turn it on. The standard option simply alerts you when data usage is high, while the low option triggers the alert any time more than 1MB is used. Video sites, for example, will set off the standard alert.

This option might not be super useful on a desktop machine, although it is supported on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS, but it should prove very handy on mobile devices. Supported on iOS and Android, this feature could prove pretty invaluable for those with tight data caps. This feature is still in early development, so don’t expect it to arrive in the stable channel for quite some time.


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