"If the update is a tenth of the size, we can push ten times as many per unit of bandwidth. We have enough users that this means more users will be protected earlier."

Yes I read the article as well. The issue is that Google probably has as close as you can get to an infinite amount of bandwidth, which makes this sort of a low priority item. I don't want to trivialize the technology; it's obviously very cool stuff, but it's the solution to a problem I doubt they ever had.

"Hi everyone, welcome to the Monday morning Chrome staff meeting. Um... so we've gotten some push back from management. They -- guys you're not going to believe this -- they think we might be using too much bandwidth. I tried to make a snarky joke about YouTube, but they weren't having any of it. So, um... we're gonna go ahead and pull two or three guys from the [INSERT IMPORTANT BROWSER COMPONENT THAT WILL LEAD TO A BETTER BROWSER HERE] team and have them work on making the updates smaller."

I have a data cap on my Internet connection. Also, a broadband connection in India is usually 256kbps (kilobits per second, not kilobytes). I myself have a 512kbps connection.

Since broadband penetration here is not very good, people who travel a lot and need to be online most of the time use mobile Internet, which is much slower and costs much much more.

So, what do you mean by "today's Internet"?

Even on your example of a typical Indian 256kbps circuit, a 700k update is only about 20s.

   http://www25.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=700+kilobytes/256+kbps

And it's going to happen in the background anyway. jQuery (as per jQuery.com) is nearly 20k minified and gzipped. So they have gone from 35 jQuery downloads to 3.5 jQuery downloads. The 10x factor is impressive, but in absolute terms I don't think it's really that noticeable.

"Today's Internet" is the one with jQuery, YouTube, Netflix streaming, last.fm, Flickr, and GMail. It's the one where most of us can get multiple mbps, or at least several hundred kbps, to our homes. It's the one where we dont notice the difference between 70k and 700k. It's actually quite nice. :-)

It's a huge difference if you were planning to constantly push live updates maybe multiple times a day to millions of users. We've seen how fast attacks can spread these days -- especially on social networks like Twitter where users easily fall into a false sense of security because they trust their friends. If Chrome was constantly streaming in either full blown fixes or just some basic attack prevention code like URL=X on DOMAIN=Y then -a href could really cut down on the spread of these attacks. Not a perfect system but much better than ignoring the problem entirely.

They might make it out as an advantage for the customer, but what they really mean is "fewer, smaller CDN servers." A YouTube video, say, might be requested quite a few times in a day/hour/minute, but when a web browser notices it has an update, they all try to update, all at once. A 10x reduction in size is going to help a bit with handling that peak load.

Say there are 3 million chrome users. 700 KB * 3 million = 2.1TB. That is quite a lot of bandwidth. They are not trying to reduce the costs. They are trying to minimize the time it will take to push an update to all users.

If they set the time interval of update check to 1 hour, then they have 1 hour to push out this data. If they can reduce the data by 10 times, they can schedule the update check more aggressively.

A lot of people are on surprisingly crappy connections.

This isn't a clever way to update to lynx, or to send firmware updates to a Mars rover (that would be really cool use case). It's for Google Chrome, the browser that Google built to handle the next generation (read as: bandwidth hungry) of web applications. Besides that, the browser update download typically happens in the background, so even if it is slow, I'd bet that the difference between 70k and 700k is still negligible.

A majority of the machines in africa are so virused up that they and are broadcasting so much wormjunk that there is barely any bandwidth available for things like updates.

Every bit helps.

Anyway, doing it as well as can be done is a good challenge.

There are a lot of people who use EDGE/3G without unlimited bandwidth plan. Also, in a lot of countries people have pay-for-traffic plans. Since Chrome autoupdates itself, and there's no way to disable this, saving kilobytes has good value.