Great stuff, I started doing this in 2006 but manually. I made an unofficial google toolbar for Opera[1] that (in the unreleased final version lol) also loaded the images from the search pages when one hovered over the toolbar icons.

It took a lot of tweaking to give it the right feel. imho it shouldn't start fetching to fast in case the mouse is only moved over the link. Loading to many assets at the same time is also bad. Some should preload with a delay and hovering over a different link should discontinue preloading the previous assets.

Perhaps there is room for a paid version that crawls the linked pages a few times and preloads static assets. Who knows, perhaps you could load css, js and json as well as images and icons.

Or (to make it truly magical) make the amount of preloading depend on how slow a round trip resolves. If loading the favicon.ico (from the users location) takes 2+ seconds the html probably wont arrive any time soon.

Fun stuff, keep up the good work.

[1]- http://web.archive.org/web/20130329183223/http://widgets.ope...