This article was published on June 17, 2011

Google releases Chrome Beta with Instant Pages and Print Preview support


Google releases Chrome Beta with Instant Pages and Print Preview support

Google has released the latest version of the Chrome Beta, adding support for Instant Pages, the new feature that it announced earlier this week, as well as Print Preview. Instant Pages delivers search nearly instantly to users when clicked on.

This release of Chrome Beta is version 13.0.782.24 and implements the prerendering technology needed to make use of Instant Pages. Google explains prerendering on their Chromium blog here.

What is prerendering? Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next–for example, the ‘next page’ link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded. That’s the fundamental idea behind prerendering. The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks.

At the moment Google.com uses the technology although it is available to developers to implement on their sites as well. If you’re a developer interested in learning more you can check out the post on prerendering here and a web developer’s guide to prerendering in Chrome here.

In addition to prerendering support, the new version of Chrome Beta suggests partial matches for searches in the omnibox using your browser history.

For example, say you’ve listened to the song “Zorbing” by Stornoway a few times on YouTube, but you can’t remember the full song title or band name. Now, when you type just part of one of the words, like “orb,” you should get a suggestion due to the partial match: “YouTube.com – Stornoway – ‘Zorbing’ Official Video.”

The much requested ‘Issue 173‘, AKA Print Preview, has also been addressed in this latest beta. You can now use Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer to see a page that you’d like to print as a PDF. Pages can be adjusted via the print settings menu and changes will be displayed live. You also have the choice to save the page as a PDF at that point.

You can snag the latest version of Chrome Beta from Google here.

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