Chrome to label ‘Fast Page’ sites on mobile browser – exclusively for Android

Google is always on a mission of making the world wide web a better place. With its users in mind, the tech company constantly releases updates to improve users’ experience.

It had previously talked about labeling sites that load slowly, warning would-be visitors. But now, the tech company is moving the opposite way – highlighting websites that deliver a better experience for its users.

Read: Chrome is working on a feature that extends laptop’s battery life up to two hours

‘Fast page’ label on Chrome for Android

Google is now rolling out a system that labels sites that load quickly. The system aims to highlight sites on the Chrome browser that offer a better user experience.

But there’s a catch…

The roll out will only be available to Android devices for now.

In a blog, the company announced that Chrome will label ‘fast pages’ for certain websites deemed to have good performance. The labeling is determined by Google’s Web Vitals.

It is an initiative announced by Google to provide both web developers and website owners a unified set of metrics for building websites with two things in mind: user experience and site performance.

Core Web Vitals set the metrics it considers vital for web experience. It measures a web page’s responsiveness and visual stability.

“We believe the web serves a critical role in our lives, and hope that fast labeling proves helpful to users who are on slow or spotty network connections. Over time, we may also experiment with labeling in other parts of Chrome’s UI,” the company said.

Where do you see the ‘fast page’ label?

Here is how the ‘fast page’ label will work:

If you visit a webpage for an article and you see a link, long-press on the link. The ‘fast page’ label will then appear on the context menu for the link, allowing the potential visitor this performance tip glimpse into whether the link is a slow webpage or a speedy one.

The point of the update is clear: it benefits the site visitors. However, Google has not revealed whether speedy sites are rewarded in other ways. But one thing’s for sure, these sites are offered higher search rankings.

‘Fast page’ label is hidden, users will have to enable

Google is already in the process of rolling out the ‘Fast page’ labeling system in the beta version of Chrome 85 on Android. However, the system is hidden and users will have to activate it.

Users must make sure that they are running the Chrome Beta – which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Then, they will need to follow these steps:

Step 1: Open Chrome Beta and visit chrome://flags
Step 2: Search for ‘Context menu performance info and remote hint fetching’
Step 3: Then, enable the hidden setting using the drop-down menu
Step 4: Finally, restart Chrome

It is still unclear when the feature will be available in the desktop version of Chrome. Also, there is no word yet on when the system will make its way to iOS devices. At this time, it looks like the feature is available only to Android Chrome users.