Like it or not, thinking about every megabyte is essential for smartphone owners hoping to keep their monthly usage from topping whatever tier they've purchased. The nasty, unbecoming world of data caps isn't changing in the near-term, and Google knows it. Following in the footsteps of Opera, the outfit's Chrome browser for iOS is evidently equipped with a data compression feature that's engineered to save precious bytes when browsing via mobile. This technology has existed for some time, but it's just now being rolled out en masse to those with an iPhone. We're told that it "compresses and minimizes HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, removing unnecessary whitespace, comments and other metadata not essential to rendering the pages," which can reduce data usage by up to 50 percent on certain sites. So, Apple -- thinking about tossing something similar under the hood of Mobile Safari?