14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome 13 has just been released and its most touted feature is Instant Pages. The technology which works on Google.com, but, in theory, could be implemented by any website, asks Chrome to start loading a page in the background, even if users haven't yet indicated that they want to visit that page.
This way, by the time users are ready to visit the said page, provided that they do, it will be ready for them, already loaded and will be displayed instantly, hence the name.
The technology that enables this, dubbed prerendering, is built into Google Chrome 13, but websites have to specifically ask the browser to use it, Chrome itself doesn't decide what pages or websites to load.
This means that, for now, only the Google search engine has enabled the feature.
"Instant Pages uses new prerendering technology that’s available in Chrome, and will be enabled by default in the newest version of Chrome, released today," Ziga Mahkovec, Software Engineer at Google Search, explained.
"When we can predict with reasonable confidence that you'll click the first result, Instant Pages will begin loading the webpage early. By the time you click on the result, the entire webpage will often appear to have loaded instantly," he added.
Any site can enable the functionality, the trick is determining with a high degree of certainty which page a user is going to load.
For a multi-page article, for example, this is simple, for a search engine it requires a lot more data and a strong algorithm.
This is why Google believes that only some websites will be able to make the best of the Chrome technology.
There are a few issues with the Instant Pages technology, false positives will happen and a website will use up bandwidth and computing power to send a page that never ends up being seen by a user.
Google hopes to avoid this with, in the first place, a strong algorithm and secondly with Page Visibility API which is in the process of becoming standard. With Page Visibility, a website can ask a browser whether a page is in the active tab, in a background tab, or is just being prerendered.