Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations | Web Platform | Chrome for Developers
November 21, 2024
A brief history of prerender
In the past, Chrome supported the resource hint, however it was not broadly supported beyond Chrome, and it wasn’t a very expressive API.
This legacy prerendering using the link rel=prerender hint was deprecated in favor of NoState Prefetch, which instead fetched the resources needed by the future page, but did not fully prerender the page nor execute JavaScript. NoState Prefetch does help improve page performance by improving the resource loading, but won’t deliver an instant page load like a full prerender would.
The Chrome team has now reintroduced full prerendering back into Chrome. To avoid complications with existing usage, and to allow for future expansion of prerendering, this new prerender mechanism won’t use the syntax, which remains in place for NoState Prefetch, with a view of retiring this at some point in the future.
Source: Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations | Web Platform | Chrome for Developers
Prefetching and pre-rendering a page dramatically increases the perceived performance of a site once an initial pre is loaded. But it is potentially wasteful of energy and bandwidth.
So early pre-rendering approaches in Chrome were deprecated. Now, speculation rules is a new approach that aims to balance the competing concerns of performance and wastefulness.
