There is simple way to speed this up. All Google Search links point to redirection service: www.google.gr/url?example.com. It is trivial to write script which makes those links direct.
Will other browsers be implementing support for this? How much of this type of improvement should we view as Google's ambitions and fast pace of execution, and how much as a Microsoft-style move to lock in users to a specific platform that offers a better, but incompatible, experience?<p>I'm not taking sides here, I don't know enough to make a judgement. But it's interesting that Google seems to be increasing their pattern of standards-tweaking in order to make a superior product - and who can fault them for that? But isn't that how we got so much of the mess that MS made?<p>What's to be done?
How long until Google just allows to host the results on their website - the destination opens instantly (preloaded while you gaze thru the results).<p>I mean it's not great for net neutrality standpoint, but it's a next logical step for them.
Other then search engines what type of sites gain any benefit from this?<p>For external links, if you aren't a search engine, you don't know what resources need to be prefetched and even if you did you will have no way of knowing when it changes (other then manually).
For internal links, in most cases the resources are already cached and http 2.0 server push is going to fix the rest.<p>Beyond that, the API looks clunky - instead of having a "prefetch" attribute on a link, you need to add more links with special syntax to the header dynamically.<p>What's the point in adding this functionality to a browser? this looks like an implementation specifically designed to make only google search faster.
is 0.1 seconds improvement a big deal? Especially on mobile/g3 that is lost in the noise. By comparison, pages right here on HN routinely take 10+ seconds to load for me, even on a gigabit uplink.
book by the author:<p><a href="http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/index.ht...</a>
if you like this topic you might also be interested in a recent HN post of mine, that did not get much attention, on the topic of all the various possible techniques or patterns we can draw from in order to improve performance (eg. lower latency, increased throughput) or scalability:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665707" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665707</a>
Posting from a throwaway account since I work on a competing browser.<p>I think Google needs to check its steps quite carefully when doing things like these. For quite some time they have leveraged their search monopoly (think about their EU search market share) to bring search/browser-type integration features to chrome first. I would say this is abusing a monopoly in one market segment (search in the EU) to attempt to create a monopoly in another segment (browsers in the EU) by continually making sure that Chrome is the browser that works better than other browsers when using Google search services.<p>Yes, this is innovative, but there is also a concept known as antitrust laws. Another way of bringing this to the market would have been to invite competing browsers to use this and build a credible time plan for a simultaneous launch for all the browsers that wanted to support this.