Google Chrome 56 Makes Page Reloading 28 Percent Faster

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Google Chrome 56 Makes Page Reloading 28 Percent Faster

In addition to security improvements, Google Chrome 56 also comes with under-the-hood tweaks that make page loading faster by as much as 28 percent, according to data provided by the Mountain View-based search giant itself.

Google explains that in order to improve page reloading speed, the firm’s engineers focused specifically on simplifying the older implementation, which had a browser connect to the web server to check for cached resources. This involves hundreds of network requests per page and connections established to several domains, and this is why sometimes the process itself is very slow.

Google says that latency is absolutely normal especially on mobile devices, where users could also experience performance issues with the browser.

But in Chrome 56, Google is trying to simplify the whole process by only validating the main resource, as the company discovered that users refreshing pages are most often looking for fresh content.

“To improve the stale content use case, Chrome now has a simplified reload behavior to only validate the main resource and continue with a regular page load. This new behavior maximizes the reuse of cached resources and results in lower latency, power consumption, and data usage,” the firm says.

Facebook applauding the improvements
Page reloads were necessary in the past mostly because of broken websites, as users refreshed websites because something didn’t look right. But since this is no longer the case with today’s sites, most users refresh pages because they are looking for new content, and this is why Chrome’s new system is supposed to be very efficient.

Facebook is one of the companies that are already seeing a major speed improvement in the latest Chrome version, and the social network indeed experiences 28 percent faster reloads plus 60 percent fewer validation requests from users running the latest version of Chrome.

It goes without saying that this will come in super-handy on both PC and mobile, but performance on the latter category should be particularly improved given the reduced optimizations that websites feature for smartphones.