Google turbo-charging the back button with Chrome’s new “back/forward cache”

Now that's some shiny chrome.

Enlarge / Now that’s some shiny chrome. (credit: Marc Ellis / Flickr)

Google is developing a new cache for Chrome (via CNET)that should make some page loads extremely fast. The only catch? They’ll have to be pages you’ve already seen and are revisiting after hitting the browser’s back button.

Chrome already caches the files that make up a page, so revisiting a page in most circumstances shouldn’t force the browser to retrieve the images, JavaScripts, and CSS that are used to build the page. But currently, the browser has to re-parse the HTML and re-build the page’s programmatic representation, uncompress the images, re-execute all the JavaScript, reapply all the stylesheets, and so on. It’s just the networking step that gets skipped.

The new bfcache (for “back/forward cache”) changes that: it lets the browser capture the entire state of a running page—including scripts that are in the middle of execution, the rendered images, and even the scroll position—and reload that state later. With bfcache, rather than having to reload the page from scratch, the page will look as if it was paused when you click a link to a new page and subsequently resumed when you hit back.

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Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.

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