In spite of stiff competition from other browsers Google Chrome is undoubtedly the fastest and the most responsive browser. With 11 versions in, Chrome continues to improvise. Google‘s latest experiments with Chrome involves pre-rendering of pages to reduce (atleast visibly) their load times. Pre-rendering means to load an element or a webpage in the background before its link is clicked i.e. explicitly requested by the user. Currently, this feature is in an experimental stage but you can use it nonetheless.

To pre-render a page, web-masters have to include a <link rel="prefetch" > tag to the header. For example, if you wish to pre-load page 2 while the user is on page 1, you’ll include the following line in page 1′s header:

<link rel="prefetch" type="text/html" href="page-2.html" />

The actual process is pretty simple. When Chrome identifies a link with a ‘prefetch’ tag, it renders it in an invisible tab. When the user clicks the link, the invisible tab’s content is instantaneously swapped with RenderView (i.e. a visible tab). In case the user does not, the content is removed from the invisible tab after a pre-defined time interval, which is usually less than a minute. Here’s the simple flowchart:

Pre-rendering is one small but very useful feature. For example a lot of content that needs to be loaded dynamically could be pre-fetched, which can then appear to be load instantaneously when called for. At the least, pre-rendering gives an impression of a faster website. You can read more about Chrome‘s pre-rendering here.