The Chrome Lite Mode, also known as “Data Saver”, introduced in 2014 to help users save data and speed up page loading, was removed in version 100 of Chrome.

With ImageEngine, we’ve seen a drop from around 20% of all requests having the Lite Mode enabled to between 2 and 5 %.

99% of those with Lite Mode enabled today are Smartphones. Lite Mode is still available for Androids.

To make the browser send the save-data:on header, Android users must enabled it in the system settings. This feature came in M102.

Question is why people enable Lite Mode. Google disabled it because “data cost has lowered”, but of course Google wanted to save money by not maintaining the servers that did transcoding.

Do users enable Lite Mode really want to make the page load faster? If cost is no issue, then there must be other reasons (or Google is wrong).