Google Chrome browser pre-loading content of websites or webpages before your visit in the background is not new, this is called prerendering. Google is working on a new Prerender, Prerender2 in Chrome to load websites almost instantaneously. Omnibox Prerendering is part of the feature, the company is now readying to ship it.
Omnibox Prerendering
Chrome has the built-in ability to load content in the background before you complete type URL in Omnibox. This is called Omnibox prerendering.
Chrome has the feature available since version 17 but Google has deprecated the old Prerender.
From Chrome 63 onwards, the browser uses NoState Prefetch where it fetches resources in advance, but it does not execute code or render the page. The aim of it is to use less memory than prerendering and still reduce page load times.
In brief, Prerendering
- improves user experience and developers can also add preload links to their content for Chrome to recognize and load that content quickly
- reduces the time gap between you pressing Enter and when you see a fully loaded page. Sometimes, pages load instantaneously.
Chrome to take advantage of new feature to load the content of address bar autocomplete suggestions which users have a high chance to visit. Google has confirmed it would like to ship Omnibox Prerendering.
“We would like to ship Omnibox (i.e URL bar) prerendering. With this feature, Chrome will start pre-rendering the high-confidence Omnibox autocomplete suggestions. ”
“Chrome is currently prefetching resources for high-confidence suggestions using NO-state Prefetch, but with this feature will be further processing the webpage including DOM tree construction and script execution”.
Enable Prerender2 & Omnibox Prerendering in Chrome browser
- Visit chrome://flags
- Find Omnibox trigger for Prerender2, in the dropdown for it, select Enabled
- Restart the browser.
You might like to enable Prerender2 also, which Google running as an origin trial since August 2021.
While first ” enables the new omnibox trigger prerenderer implementaion”, the second enables “the new Prerenderer implementation for <Script type=speculationrules> that specifies prerender candidates”.
The above flags are also available in the stable version of Chrome.
Demo
After enabling the flag and restarting the browser, you can test the feature by visiting this page.
https://omnibox-prerender.glitch.me/
Prerender2 demo page: https://prerender2-specrules.glitch.me/
The above link offers options to prerender 3 different pages using <link rel=Prerender> and Speculation rules API. You can select each of the options and can check if prerender happens.
Final words:
Chrome makes instant navigation possible with Prerender 2 by anticipating what users likely to visit next. Google has shipped Prerender2 for Chrome on desktop with version 105.
What’s your take on Chrome’s Omnibox Prerendering and new Prerender features? Let us know in the comments below.
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