Introducing Prerendering Technology into Google's Chrome Web Browser

Giving users a more secured web browser is not just enough. That's not to say security is not important or anything like that but even if you have the world most secured web browser still, if it loads pages dauntingly slower... well I seriously doubt that anyone would be interested.

Anyway, starting with shorter release cycles, Google is certainly throwing everything at their simplified web browser called Chrome. Personally I'm not a huge fan and it had some issues in the past concerning user privacy, etc but the developers of the original Chromium are certainly adding cutting edge features, one after the other, nonetheless.

The latest one is called web page "prerendering". The technology is not invented by Google/Chrome but has been there for a while, as far as I know.

Anyhow the idea is pretty simple. Unlike with the usual behavior for the web browser where it totally depends on the user to tell him what site to load, etc but when you use the browser after enabling prerendering, it'll use algorithms to predict your next move!. Sounds a bit risky ... let me humbly give an example.

Say that you searched for Google for the term "learn GNU/Linux fast", then while the Chrome browser display the SERP result page, it'll also be working from the background and silently be loading the web page that it thinks you'll most probably click on.

Say that it cached or saved to disk the website that stands at the first in big G for that term, and the browser was actually correct about the prediction, since you did click on the the link of the first website, then you'll see an instant webpage loading! (0.00 waiting time).


But here's the thing...

Shi* happens...

Now for to prerendering to occur, it needs reasonably faster internet connection, otherwise it can easily jeopardize the user experience by making the whole process of loading a the webpage more slower than usual. For instance, let's assume that Chrome was fetching a website called "A" and it did contain a reasonable amount of data thus requiring some bandwidth. Now this is fine as long as the user chooses to click on the link of site "A" in Google.

But what if the user actually click on the site below "A" called the site "B" which is positioned 2nd. Now we have a situation where the web browser loads two websites simultaneously, one site is totally unnecessarily loaded thus making the actual site ("B" in this instance) loading more slowly (obviously). This is the most obvious issue.

Although as soon as the web browser realizes the situation, it'll stop loading the site "A" but... there's an another one.

Here's Google's own video example about it...



Say that like me, you have an internet connection with a monthly usage limit. Then by prerendering the wrong the website means unnecessary data/bandwidth usage, which is not good at all.

Anyway, from a user point of view, this is the most hardest part, prediction. Will there be a day where the computer software be able to predict all our actions, if so, then it'll wipe out the whole possibility for "free" thinking.... :/.

So, it's actually pretty interesting to watch the advancement of this prerendering technology and its success. Well I guess we'll certainly know whether its successful or not in the near future. Oh btw, this feature is proposed for the upcoming Google Chrome web browser and is also available in the Chrome Dev channels.

But not everyone will be using the Dev channels since they're actually beta versions thus won't be giving the most secured web browser version nonetheless. So, it's best to wait.