Google plans to ship pre-rendered omnibox in Chrome

Google may soon integrate a new feature into its Chrome web browser called omnibox pre-rendering to speed up the loading of certain websites in the browser.

Current versions of Google Chrome also support prefetch, but the process is limited as it doesn’t run JavaScript or display the page in advance. The main goal of the feature was to use less memory than full pre-rendering according to Google while reducing page load times in the process.

Pre-rendering speeds up the website loading process as some of the content is pre-loaded. Google changed Chrome’s pre-rendering behavior in version 63 when it limited functionality. While pre-rendering can speed up site loading, it can also waste resources at times; this happens when content is preloaded that the user never sees, for example, when a site with preloaded content is not accessed.

Omnibox prerendering adds more elements to the prerendering process. In particular, Chrome will process DOM tree construction and script executions. The browser limits the new omnibox pre-rendering feature to “high-trust suggestions” only according to the intent of posting discussion in Google Groups.

We would like to send the omnibox (ie the URL address bar) pre-rendered. With this feature, Chrome will start pre-rendering high-trust omnibox autocomplete suggestions. Chrome currently prefetches resources for high-trust suggestions using stateless prefetch, but with this feature we’ll still render the web page, including building the DOM tree and running the script.

Websites selected by Chrome for processing are “loaded before browsing is confirmed,” Google notes. Chrome will support a basic API that websites can use to find out if and when it was pre-rendered.

The new omnibox pre-rendering feature will be supported on all platforms that Chrome is available on. Google plans to introduce it first on Android before it becomes available on other platforms. Chrome users can set an experimental flag in the browser to enable the feature right now in Chrome.

1. Load chrome://flags/#omnibox-trigger-for-prerender2 in the address bar of Chrome.
2. Set the state of the experimental flag to enabled.
3. Restart the Chrome browser.

A demo page is available at https://omnibox-prerender.glitch.me/ to test the functionality.

The feature should be considered experimental at this point. Work on version 2 pre-rendering continues at Google.

Now you: What is your opinion on preloading? Good feature? (via Technologies)

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