Google has started rolling out Chrome 52 on Android with the aim to make video playback on the browser smoother, faster, and more power-efficient. The company does not go into the details in its announcement, but it mentions that thanks to underlying changes, video playback in Chrome will be smoother with load times being reduced greatly as well.

A video posted by Google shows videos loading up to 5x faster on the latest version of Chrome for Android. The changes should be most noticeable in short videos and those that are in HTML5 format.

https://youtu.be/67bd3XtY6u8

Additionally, watching video will now consume lesser data as they now work with the built-in Data Saver mode in Chrome. This will allow you to save as much as up to 50% data while watching (compressed) videos.

Google notes in its blog post that more than a billion hours of video are played on Chrome every week, so these changes should make the experience of watching videos on the browser significantly better for millions of users out there.

The update is already live on the Google Play Store, but in case it is not showing up for you, you can sideload the APK from here.