List Pages That Get Prerendered by Google Chrome

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 11, 2011
Updated • Apr 26, 2015
Google Chrome
|
7

Prerendering in the best case speeds up specific processes. When it comes to web browsers the technology is used to pre-load and render websites to display them faster for the user.

This only works if the browser gets the site right though; If you look at a standard web search for instance, you will get ten search results by default plus other pages that you could click on.

It would be a tremendous waste of processing power and bandwidth if the browser would load all of those pages, especially if the user clicks on one result only on that page.

The Google Chrome web browser, and Chromium as well, use prerendering in a limited way. It may be used when you enter a phrase into the Chrome address bar. But which page or pages do get prerendered when this is happening?

That's easy to find out (thanks to François Beaufort who posted a short demonstration video on YouTube). All you need to do is to open the Google Chrome or Chromium Task Manager to see which pages get prerendered by the web browser.

google chrome prerender pages

You can open the Chrome Task Manager with a click on the Wrench icon, the selection of Tools and Task Manager, or  alternatively by using the keyboard shortcut Shift-Esc to bring up the Task Manager directly.

Look for Prerender: entries in the Task Manager. The indicator is followed either by the site url that got prerendered or the page title. It may still take time to identify the prerendered link on the page as Google Chrome does not display information about it in the Task Manager.

Update: Google changed the way prerendering is disabled in Chrome. Load chrome://settings/ in Chrome, click on show advanced settings on the page that opens and uncheck "prefetch resources to load pages more quickly" in the options under privacy. The original method described below does not work anymore. End

Prerendering in the web browser is automatically enabled by default. Users who do not want to use the feature can disable it the following way. Enter chrome://flags in the address bar and locate the "Prerender from omnibox" option.

prerender from omnibox preference

Enables prerendering of suggestions from the Omnibox and predicts appropriate network actions (prerendering, Instant, DNS preconnect) by calculating a confidence value for each Omnibox result.

Switch to disabled in the pulldown menu to turn the feature off.

Summary
List Pages That Get Prerendered by Google Chrome
Article Name
List Pages That Get Prerendered by Google Chrome
Description
Find out which pages the Google Chrome browser prerenders automatically when that feature is enabled.
Author
Advertisement

Previous Post: «
Next Post: «

Comments

  1. Anonymous said on November 12, 2011 at 6:29 am
    Reply

    I HATE the changes to google crome. I do not NEED the internet. It is a BIG pain to go where I want.

    I will go to the public lib. to check on things.

  2. Matt said on November 11, 2011 at 6:32 am
    Reply

    You can also go to about:net-internals#prerender to get a list of previously prerendered pages, and whether they were used. It only updates about once every 5 seconds, so not nearly as nice for realtime monitoring, but may be interesting to take a look at after quite a while of surfing.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on November 11, 2011 at 10:58 am
      Reply

      Matt that’s a great tip. Thanks for that.

Leave a Reply

Check the box to consent to your data being stored in line with the guidelines set out in our privacy policy

We love comments and welcome thoughtful and civilized discussion. Rudeness and personal attacks will not be tolerated. Please stay on-topic.
Please note that your comment may not appear immediately after you post it.