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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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?

What's to be done?

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Yes, the hope is that they will be! That's why we're working on the "Resource Hints" spec, which documents "reactive prefetch" as one of explicit use cases: https://cdn.rawgit.com/w3c/resource-hints/e19f621dad9856a92b...

The early feedback from FF, IE, (and to some extent, Webkit), folks have been positive, and I'm hoping this can be a cross-browser feature in 2015 (yes, I'm an optimist).

My (biased) view on the matter is that this instance is a useful standards are pushed forwards. rel='prefetch' is well trod (some support existed in Firefox <3.5) and part of the HTML5 standard. The browser appears to be given a lot of leeway in how to implement link prefetching (the page is just hinting that prefetching seems like a good idea), so persisting prefetches across navigations seems entirely within the spirit and the letter of the standard. The high profile launch of this feature in a major product is a signal that other browsers can take that persisting a prefetch across a navigation is worthwhile. That sort of feedback about what works and what's important is very helpful to the standards process, and very much aligned with the spirit of rough consensus and running code.
Abuse of standards, to me, looks more like intentionally breaking compatibility with other browsers or implementing features that are easy for one party to implement and hard for anyone else to. For example, ActiveX was problematic in part because it was straightforwards to implement on Windows and a nightmare to try to implement anywhere else. This forced other browsers to either make their non-windows users second class citizens, or fall behind on feature parity.

I work at google, but as a ground level engineer working on internal tooling, not on Chrome or Search or anything. My views here are my own.

Or to look at it another way, Google made their search experience faster on platforms they control Android/Chrome, but slower (or normal speed, whatever you want to call it) everywhere else. I'm pretty sure if MS did that they'd be (rightfully) criticized for it.

I think this is just a work-around for the sloppiness of the web. If all the resources for a page were compiled into a single file and sent all at once, this wouldn't be necessary, but that'd be inefficient to for subsequent page requests.

Sites that want to get the same speedup can make sure they don't have any secondary resources that block page rendering.

Finally, the particular mechanism, link rel="prefetch" is used by Bing and IE 11 [1]. Google has just found a way to prefetch even earlier than normal, by inserting the prefetch links into the search page as soon as the user clicks.

[1]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/12/04/getting-to-the...

> I think this is just a work-around for the sloppiness of the web. If all the resources for a page were compiled into a single file and sent all at once, this wouldn't be necessary, but that'd be inefficient to for subsequent page requests.

The benefit of the web was that you didn't have a fat GUI locally. With the push to aggregate assets together and get the entire UI/logic into the client browser, cached, and read off of remote services, we're slowly making our way back to local GUI apps. This time, the browser is the OS (forgive the poor analogy).

What was old is new again.

I don't think this offers an "incompatible experience" - my reading of the post is that the experience is fully compatible and that users of non-Chrome browsers will still be able to use Google Search. Currently, some/all non-Chrome browsers won't do the extra prefetches.

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