New Chrome Beta Will Load Pages Before You Finish Typing

There’s an ancient proverb that states: “You gotta go fast. You gotta go fast. You gotta go faster. Faster. Faster, faster, faster.” The new Google Chrome Beta browser has taken this principle to heart and added functionality that will actually start pre-loading pages before you’ve finished typing their addresses. If you’re not familiar, the Google Chrome Beta browser has all the space age functionality that isn’t yet fit for a standard Chrome release, and is available to anyone who wants to play with it. The question is, are you really comfortable with having Google Chrome reading your mind?

Okay, so it clearly isn’t actually reading your mind. The process is actually pretty simple; if you’re typing in a URL that auto-completes to that of a site you’re “very likely to visit” — which I imagine means you’ve typed it in before — Google Chrome Beta will start preloading the page in the background the second it gets a handle on the auto-completed address. So really, while it does sort of seem like witchcraft, Google Chrome Beta is just pretending that you pressed enter at the earliest possible moment in the auto-complete cycle. What constitutes “very likely to visit” is a little hazy, but it doesn’t seem like anything impossible to suss out with an algorithm that’s sifting through your search history.

In addition to the preloading, the new Chrome Beta adds some security features like letting you scan .exe and .msi files. Useful, but not particularly exciting in comparison. If you want to try it out, you can pick up the browser at the Google Chrome Beta download page, which you may notice, hasn’t had its PageRank decreased. I think I might have to give it a try and see how noticeable the difference is. Can that extra few seconds of typing in the URL really make a difference in loading time? I hope so, because that sounds awesome.

(via Venture Beat)

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