The Next Chrome Will Load Your Next Link For You

Google's Chrome browser is very much engineered for speed. Software optimizations can only take you so far until the bottleneck becomes latency and bandwidth of your connection.

In the next version of Chrome, Google will be employing a background pre-loading trick that many other web accelerators have been using for years. Google says that it has an algorithm to know when Chrome can confidently preload the top search result so that when it's clicked, it will load instantly.

Google describes it in a blog post:

What is prerendering? Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next--for example, the 'next page' link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded. That's the fundamental idea behind prerendering. The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks.

Although Google.com is the most high profile site to use prerendering, it's a technology that is available to any site. Triggering prerendering well, however, is challenging to do correctly and will only be useful to a handful of sites that have a high degree of certainty of where their users will click next. Triggering prerendering for the wrong site could lead to the link the user did click on loading more slowly.

Instant pages will be in the next version of Chrome, but those who are adventurous can try a developer version here.

Check out the video on it below: