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Opera Developer Comes With Address Bar Speculative Prerenderer Feature (opera.com)
Earlier this month, Opera announced a new interesting feature with Opera 43 developer that predicts the website you're about to go to. The company explains: There are two ways we can predict what page the user will soon load. When the current page tells us so, and when we can determine from the users actions that they are about to load something. Pages can use the tag, and for instance Google uses that for search results if they are pretty sure of what you will load next. When someone writes in the address bar they are humanly slow. Sometimes it is obvious what they will write after just 1-2 characters but they will just keep writing or arrowing through suggestions for millions or billions of wasted clock cycles. We expect this feature to results in an average of 1 second faster loads from the address bar. The company insists that this feature saves time and energy without compromising the security. What's your thought?
Wow, a whole second? Definitely should be implemented. Don't bother addressing the bug lists, only do new features. It is waaaaaay more fun.
So arrowing through the suggestion list is bad because it uses "millions or billions of wasted clock cycles", but downloading and rendering an entire website is perfectly OK?
I think they meant that it wastes the user's time, not that it wastes clock cycles.
Every failed guess is more bandwidth, server load, client load wasted.