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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?
My thoughts exactly. Billions of cycles on the client's machine, billions of cycles on the different servers that are needlessly serving this speculative content for the first few incorrect guesses, billions of cycles on all the routers in between...
Where exactly do they think they are saving energy? One second of display power and idling cpu on the client side? I would be highly surprised if this would be net positive.
Yes, it will load pages slightly faster. But at the expense of quite a bit of wasted energy.