We already explained a few weeks ago how Microsoft wanted to make Internet Explorer 11 the fastest internet browser, it claimed to be 30% faster than any other browser on Windows 7. Now we have learned that part of that faster package will involve pre-rendered searches on Microsoft’s Bing search engine when using Internet Explorer 11.
What this means is when you’re using Bing and you start to type something Bing will intelligently predict what to pre-render (normally the top search results given what you’ve typed at that current point). The result is near instant page loading when using Bing with IE11. Microsoft claims to be doing this in a streamlined way that prevents battery life on mobile devices being eaten up. Microsoft’s blog post explains it all in more detail:
“Today we are introducing an improvement available for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) that helps you accomplish your search tasks even faster. The next time you perform a search in Bing using IE11, you’ll notice that when you click on the top result, the associated page is almost instantly rendered. To achieve this, we leverage IE11’s pre-render tag to automatically download and render the top result page in the background – it does this in a streamlined fashion taking care to not waste your bandwidth and battery life.
With pre-rendering, you can now enjoy a faster end-to-end search experience, whether you are trying to navigate to a popular web destination (e.g. “New York Times”) or looking for movie reviews (e.g. “Django Unchained reviews”). Because half of people click on the first result on the search results page, pre-rendering that page is an important addition in our quest to improve the overall task completion time.”
Image courtesy of eTeknix via Bing
But I wonder if the damage isn’t already done. Hardly anyone I know uses IE anymore. No doubt Google, Mozilla etc. will incorporate this feature sooner (if they already don’t) rather than later thereby nullifying the advantage. MS are famous for ignoring the consumers pleas although from time to time they do come up with some good ideas & products.
I do like the touch controls with IE though. Mozilla needs to get its finger out and implement them so I can use it properly on my Surface Pro.
I thought google already did this with their search engine?
I know that chrome pre-loads pages too, so this is hardly original…
Yes Google do. It’s not original. It’s just the first time MS have done it 🙂