Future Versions of Chrome Will Predict Your Next Link & Pre-Render Pages Automatically
Future Versions of Chrome Will Predict Your Next Link & Pre-Render Pages Automatically
Posted 06/19/2011 at 10:46am
| by Justin Kerr
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Google engineers are known for doing whatever it takes to shave precious milliseconds off of page loads, but it’s pretty rare to see them steal a page from the past in pursuit of their goal. Upcoming releases of Chrome however will do just that, adding link pre-fetching/pre-rendering to the latest editions of the company’s flagship browser.
Web accelerator tools with this capability have been available since Windows 95, but admittedly their popularity waned a bit when people made the jump from dial up to DSL. In typical Google fashion however, the algorithms behind their unique form of link scrapping has been tweaked considerably to make them more web friendly, and useful.
Here is a quick snipped from the Google blog post describing the process (or just watch the video).
“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.”
The feature is currently only available in the developer editions of Chrome, but when a feature makes this much sense, expect it to show up in the stable build sooner, rather than later.
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MattGreer
June 20, 2011 at 2:39pm
So if I'm at work, and Chrome somehow guesses I need to go to some site of ill-repute, can I tell my company that I didn't actually click that link?? BAD IDEA, and it's going to make me go back to IE, sadly.
afunyun
June 20, 2011 at 12:03pm
I use Canary and we've had this feature turned on for a while (I'm on Chrome 14 right now)
It works. It's like URL prediction that makes it feel like the webpage loads instantly
Trust me
Neufeldt2002
June 20, 2011 at 12:21pm
"Trust me"
Famous last words before something awful happening.
Pokedex1010
June 20, 2011 at 11:49am
You better be able to turn this "feature" off, otherwise, cue endless streams of virus infection clean ups.
someuid
June 20, 2011 at 8:21am
Reading the blog, I see this is being done in partnership with an owner's web page, meaning the web page owner can identify what links on the page should be pre-rendered and the browser will do so.
Expect companies to make a major mess of this.
I hope this can be disabled. If not, hopefully someone will write an add-in that will intercept and discard the pre-rendering tags or requests.
Silencer
June 20, 2011 at 1:11pm
Just popped in my head, a way to disable it:
Firefox or Opera or Safari or...
:O) But ya I'm with you. (I still roll with FF though!)
icebox1701
June 19, 2011 at 10:53pm
Not to mention the iresponsible load put on servers. I can see this being blocked serverside. I don't want to overprovision my servers just because some idiot alorythm misses it over and over.
Neufeldt2002
June 19, 2011 at 11:46am
No thanks, I'll pass. In today's world I just don't see the need to pre-render anything on the net. I can see this being useful on dial-up and slow connections, but that is it. Also, I wonder how long until someone figures out how to get the pre-rendering engine to pre-load malware and viruses? Anything that does that on the net, in my opinion, is dangerous because then the end user doesn't even need to visit the page to get hit.
Taz0
June 20, 2011 at 9:50am
Yeah, I'd hate for it to pre-load the page that's behind the "Confirm Purchase" link on a shopping site, the "Send" link on my webmail account when I'm half way through writing my email or even the "Logout" link at the top of this very page.
In computing, side effects can be quite a pain in the ass. On some websites, practically every link you click has a side effect, be it changing a preference, upvoting or liking something, affecting your history, performing an irreversible action, being charged for content, etc.
urdead4g
June 19, 2011 at 6:41pm
Agreed! Not to mention if people are being capped, this kind of thing could speed up the cap!!
Silencer
June 20, 2011 at 12:29am
Ya, didn't think about that one, ya. When I mentioned bandwidth, I was only thinking in terms of my programs competing for my pipe, not the caps.
kixofmyg0t
June 19, 2011 at 3:43pm
Agreed.
I can see this turning into pre-loading ad's more than anything else. Oh and the glorious security holes this could lead to! Now you won't even have to visit an infected page to get mal-ware! Thanks Google! Ur teh bestest!
Marthian
June 19, 2011 at 11:55pm
lets hope for a way to disable this. or better yet, maybe it be disabled by default.
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