Chrome Bring ‘Back Forward Cache’ to Desktop for Instant Page Loads

Google Chrome for desktop is about to get a new speed boost update which will benefits to all platform user while browsing web pages. This feature was first spotted by Windows Latest, the browser’s dev plan to add something called “back-forward cache” to desktop builds of the browser. This feature was earlier introduced and was enable on Android last year.

Back-forward caches provides instantaneous page loading when navigating backward or forward. Devs want to experimentally introduce the feature on all of Chrome’s desktop platforms, i.e. Windows, macOS and Linux, in the upcoming Google Chrome 92 release, but you can still access this feature on latest version of Chrome i.e. v90.0.44.

Regarding this feature Google developer says -

“Back-forward cache is a browser feature which improves the user experience by keeping a page alive after the user navigates away from it and reuses it for session history navigation (browser back/forward buttons, history.back(), etc) to make the navigation instant. The pages in the cache are frozen and do not run any javascript,” 

By default this feature is not enable on user's browser. But if users who want to ‘opt-in’ and try the experiment can do so by enabling using the following on URL bar in the latest Chrome dev builds. 

chrome://flags/#back-forward-cache

Several options are available here, including experimental support for caching across all pages, or just those on the same site. 

This will be very useful feature which will speed up the inter-site navigation and also takes less data to load the page. From a change that speeds up browsing to one that speeds up sharing: Google’s Chrome team is working on an improved ‘share hub’ to make it easier to send web pages to other people and other devices.