Google Chrome Update Has Only A Few Kilobytes
Concerning browser security updates, Google Chrome silent update could be the safest, as compared to Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera and Apple technology, because it does not require user interaction and cannot be disabled from within the graphical user interface. Google Chrome silent update is automatically set to run every five hours, even if the browser is not running. Now, Google has made notable improvement to the silent update mechanism through the addition of a new differential compression algorithm called Courgette, which determines the process to be faster and to consume less bandwidth. For example, in case of the latest Google chrome developer channel, the size of the pushed data through Courgette is very low (just 78,848 bytes).
The developers of Google Chrome have found a better way to eliminate a 10 MB file to be transferred, corresponding to a security update of only tens or hundreds kilobytes.
“Rather than push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version. We tried several binary diff algorithms and have been using bsdiff up until now. We are big fans of bsdiff - it is small and worked better than anything else we tried.”
After the testing of the bsdiff compression algorithm, the results showed a file size served through the silent update mechanism of 704,512 bytes as compared with the full browser update of 10,385,920 bytes. But this value was considered to be still high, therefore Courgette differential compression algorithm was made in order to reduce the size of the files transferred through Google Chrome silent update process.
The new result conducted to a Google Chrome browser update file size of only 78,848 bytes. This value indicates that more users will have their Google Chrome browser automatically updated per five hours and the issues related to the navigation security will be solved before the apparition of a certain thread.
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