Published on Jun 23, 2022
Chrome 103 is now available for download. Chrome’s new version introduces a new prerendering technology, which Google believes will dramatically improve the speed at which pages load.
Desktop users can already download Chrome 103. It is easy to speed up the installation of the new update by entering chrome://settings/help into the browser’s address bar or by choosing Menu > Help > About Google Chrome.
The installed version of Chrome is displayed on the page. Any updates it finds will be downloaded and installed.
A critical severity issue was fixed in Chrome 103, among 14 other security issues.
Prerendering has been prototyped again in Chrome 103 to speed up loading of web pages.
Recently, Google changed Chrome’s rendering behavior. Known as NoState Prefetch, it replaces the classic browser prerendering process. It is imperative to note that NoState Prefetch does not execute JavaScript or render parts of the page in advance.
As a result, the new prefetching technology uses less memory than the old. NoState Prefetch consumes 45 MiB of memory, while classic prerendering uses more than twice as much, according to a blog post from Chrome Developer’s Katie Hempenius.
While memory usage is reduced, prerendering will not be used on low-end devices. Google provides no clear definition, but devices with less than 512 Megabytes of RAM are considered low end by the company.
Google’s Prerender2 aims to restore prefetching functionality in Chrome without the previous system’s resource consumption and privacy and security issues.
These issues include unwanted side effects, resource consumption, low hit rates, privacy and security concerns, and code complexity.
In the future, Prerender2 will be integrated into desktop versions of Chrome as well as Chrome for Android.
