Jake just posted a comment about Google's latest speed enhancement. Not only is it a great idea, but it is Firefox, Mozilla and other Gecko engine browser specific. These browsers support the prefetch relative link which allows a page to be downloaded in the background when it is expected the user will visit that page. A really cool feature.
I have a really fast internet connection here at work, so I tried this feature on a site that takes a little while to load: www.Borland.com. I did a search for Borland in FireFox and Internet Explorer after clearing the cache and restarting the browsers.
Before clicking the links I viewed source on both pages. The Firefox page has a new tag inserted only before the link to Borland's home page.
<link rel="prefetch" href="http://www.borland.com/">
The Internet Explorer page does not have this additional tag. I was under the impression that this prefetch tag needed to be in the header section of the page. It would appear that is not the case.
Clicking the link in Internet Explorer takes about 5 seconds before the page finishes loading. Clicking the link in Firefox takes about 1 second before the page finishes loading (as indicated by the loading progress bar on the bottom of the page.)
While the prefetched page is loaded into the Cache, it does not appear in the history until actually visited. I verified that. The FAQ says cookies may be preloaded though, which I didn't verify.
So even if someone adds a hack to Internet Explorer to recognize this tag it will require Google to return this tag to a browser claiming to be Internet Explorer.
No comments:
Post a Comment