The launch of Internet Explorer 11 as part of Windows 8.1 and more recently for Windows 7, brings new ways to speed up the overall web browser experience. One of them involves predicting which web site will be clicked on next by the user and pre-rendering that page ahead of time.
In a new blog post, Microsoft goes over how this is accomplished with IE11. It states:
The predictions are done using our understanding of browsing patterns, user browsing habits, and common cues in Web pages, like “next” links and pagination. Bing’s extensive knowledge of the Web and data mining help make these predictions laser sharp.
If you have IE11 installed, you can check out a demo of how this page prediction method works with a new IE Test Drive website. It features images of European landmarks on each of its pages that have large file sizes that can take several seconds to load in other web browser. However, those same pages are rendered nearly instantly in IE11.
Web site designers can also use a "prerender" tag in links on their pages so that when a IE11 user surfs to the site, the browser can begin to pre-render the page in the background so that it can load quicker when a person clicks on that link. Microsoft says this is accomplished without compromising battery life on a tablet or notebook PC.
The blog also talks about IE11"s support for the experimental SPDY/3 protocol, which is also designed to help with page loading times. The blog states, "SPDY/3 implements multiplexing of request / responses on a single connection. SPDY/3 improves page load time by removing the limitation on number of outstanding requests and by using a "warm" connection for each parallel download."
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft