There is nothing more frustrating in the modern world than a website that loads slowly. It always seems to happen when we’re the busiest or in a rush. Have you ever been trying to Google something in a pinch, only to find that your browser isn’t loading quickly? Maybe you’ve needed quick directions or a phone number, but the site is just taking forever to load.
While this doesn’t happen too often anymore, slow loading is still a problem that many people face. Google engineers are working on a solution for this exact problem, and it seems like they’re getting close to making that a reality.
Whether you’re new to Google Chrome as a browser or you’ve sworn by it for years, you know that it’s a great browser to use for many reasons. If you have a Gmail account, you know that it seamlessly melds all of your information together and makes your life a whole lot easier.
So now, the goal is to get webpages moving even more quickly using something called bfcache, or backwards forwards cache. What does that mean? “Google’s web browser will store a website’s state as you navigate to a new page. If you then go back to that page, Chrome will reconstitute it rapidly instead of having to reconstruct it from scratch. Then, if you retrace your steps forward again, Chrome will likewise rapidly pull that web page out of its memory cache.”
That does mean that the fast loading will only apply for websites you’ve visited before and not new ones. However, that is still a significant amount of websites of the total sites you visit. Besides, wouldn’t you want a website that you frequently visit to load even faster? We sure do.
The only thing that is tricky for Google engineers with this new feature is making sure that privacy and security is not compromise. Addy Osmani, a Google Chrome engineer, explained: “Running JavaScript on pages which are not there from the user’s perspective is a big potential privacy problem, which is why we are going to change Chrome’s architecture to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”
Bfcache is projected to be finished up sometime in 2019 and is set to be built into the browser by 2020.
