[webkit-dev] X-Purpose on prefetching requests

[Gavin Peters (蓋文彼德斯)]

On 28 September 2010 18:02, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> As far as Safari implementation experience goes, I'd like to re-iterate that preview is quite different in this respect, I don't think it's sufficiently related to be given as an example. There is no expectation that fetching a page for preview will make navigating to it faster in the future - and fulfilling that expectation is one of the central problem with prefetch. There is no question of whether fetching for preview means access for network security monitors either - you only prefetch for sites that were previously visited, roughly speaking.

If you're questioning if prefetch can make page loads faster, I can
say that on the web today it does.  The samples of prefetching on the
web today are mostly cross site.  Chrome has been experimenting with
webkit based prefetching for a while now, and our A/B experiments
suggest that on the web today, overall page loads are faster, in a
statistically significant way, for browsers that respect LINK prefetch
elements than for browsers that do not.  We're far from done our
implementation (I'm not completely satisfied with our network
prioritization, and I think our handling of caching could use a lot of
improvement), but it has great promise already for speeding up the web
in aggregate, and prefetch targets of course in particular.

- Gavin