Google Chrome is a very fast browser and they are always looking for ways to improve the speed of browsing. Fresh in the experimental features that comes in Google Chrome is what they call “Web Page Prerendering”.

Web Page Prerendering is available in Google Chrome 9.0.576.0 from the beta channel for Linux and Windows – no Mac support yet.

What prerendering does is it predicts which site the user will visit next and preloads it in the background. This results in an improved loading time of the page when it is actually opened by the user. This is still a very early experiment by Google and details of how it guesses which website the user will visit next, which is the most important part of this feature, is quite sketchy at the moment.

By default Web Page Prerendering is disabled. To enable it type about:flags in the omnibar and enter (or click here if you are reading this in Chrome). Scroll down and at the bottom you will find Web Page Prerendering. Click on Enable.

After enabling this feature for some time, it feels that page loads a bit faster but I cannot be sure how much is the difference. Do feel free to share if it actually makes browsing faster if you have enabled this.