In the ever-changing digital world we live in today, things go stale almost as soon as you receive them. Those things can be news, other content you’re reading or even video. In order to stay up to date what do you do? Reload/refresh the page. How long does that usually take?
In efforts to make Chrome much faster than the competition (Opera, Edge, Firefox etc), Google has streamlined things on the back end so that users don’t spend much time waiting for a web page to reload: it happens almost immediately. In terms of raw numbers, at least 28% faster.
Normally, when you reload a web page this is what happens: the web browser pings the web server hosting the content to check if the cached resources can still be used i.e. validation of content. Depending on where the said content is hosted, that process could involve pinging multiple domains and as a result several network requests. Then it proceeds to serve up the requested content. That is all good when the devices involved are powerful enough to handle the strain of sending multiple network requests. But most of the time that is not always the case and particularly now that a lot of web browsing happens on mobile devices.
So now what’s the solution? Simple: the browser identifies the main content resource/web server for ease of validation when one reloads so that it only has to look for new content from the other few sources that are likely to be dynamic. The end result is less power and data consumption and as a result improved speed.
