Ask HN: Why doesn't Safari support link prefetching?

4 pointsanderspitman3 comments

See [0].

This feature has been around so long I'm assuming it must be a deliberate decision, but a quick search hasn't yielded any information.

[0] https://caniuse.com/#feat=link-rel-prefetch

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I'm in the same boat. It's weird that WebKit supports `preload`, which is a newer spec, but they never mention `prefetch` support anywhere:

https://webkit.org/status/#?search=preload

I found these neglected issues in WebKit Bugzilla:

- "implement Link: header" https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51940

- "Add support for <link rel=prefetch>" https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194539

Because they prefetch without any reference to said attribute? Or at least there used to be a setting on the mobile version that was on by default that enabled that.

That's interesting. I'll have to do some tests to see if that's still the case.

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