Pre-rendering, or prerendering, is a web browser feature that speeds up your web surfing experience. When you view a web page, some content from another page or site might be prerendered in anticipation of you going there next. If you do, the new page loads very quickly because some of its elements were rendered ahead of time.

For example, the first web page on the list of Google’s search results is always prerendered if the browser supports it. Google assumes the top result is likely to be clicked and asks the browser to render that page.

Browser support

Prerendering is supported by Google Chrome and Internet Explorer version 11.

Chrome versions 63 and later use a technique called NoState Prefetch to reduce the amount of bandwidth, RAM, and disk space used by the prerendering process.

Firefox only supports prefetching of some resources and data (as defined in the HTML5 specification), such as CSS and JavaScript files, and DNS resolutions.

Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera support prefetching, but do not support prerendering.

In HTML

Web developers can specify prerendered content with the HTML tag.

Additional support and resources

  • Introducing NoState Prefetch. (Google Developers)
  • Prerender and prefetch support in IE 11. (Microsoft TechNet)
  • Clever tricks to reduce network latency. (Google presentation slides)

Cache, Internet terms, Link