Chrome 17 With Web Page Prerendering Now for Download

News
By Douglas Perry
published

Google has released the stable release of Chrome 17, which marks the arrival of prerendering support in the browser.

Prerendering kicks in as soon as a user begins typing in the URL bar of the browser and Chrome auto-completes a site's address and determines high likelihood that the site is the intended destination. Details about prerendered pages can be monitored in Chrome via the local URL chrome://net-internals/#prerender.

Google also extended the safe browsing features of Chrome and compares executable EXE and MSI files against a whitelist and information about websites that are likely to host malware.

The developer version of Chrome recently went to version 19, concluding the tree of Chrome 18, which will include more than 11,000 changes over Chrome 17. According to Chrome developer Peter Beverloo, Chrome 18 brings six new stable extension APIs, a CSS selector profiler, and mutation observers.

Chrome 17 can be downloaded here.

Douglas Perry
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • agnickolov
    And thus Chrome just upped itself in the browser rankings thanks to prediction misses...
    Reply
  • claec
    Went to download the latest version... then I checked my current version and realized that Chrome had already silently updated itself... Ah Google, I love ya :)
    Reply
  • aftcomet
    I wasn't on the release version jokes before, but 17? Come on........ It sounds retarded. They're throwing out programming conventions in the trash. Not every patch is a new version. Holy crap.
    Reply
  • notsleep
    wake me up when chrome version 9,999,999 comes out...:P
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    notsleepwake me up when chrome version 9,999,999 comes out...
    check back in a week
    Reply
  • joeman99
    Am I the only one who thinks Chrome is a structural disaster? It launches every plugin and app as a separate process but all pages are rendered by a single process. This wouldn't be so be bad but if you are like me and launch a dozen or so pages at a time from your rss reader and have just one page hang on some flash code or the like then every single page crashes. At least IE and just restart the hung one. has a separate thread so you can still view the other pages. Heck even FF lets you switch to other tabs but Chrome refuses to budge, even on a tabs that had already been downloaded and viewed seconds ago. Google should start using irrational or imaginary numbers for this travesty's versioning...
    Reply
  • zanny
    I'm waiting for some kind of compiled webpage standard, so we stop sending utf8 strings of code over the tubes. That is the major page load limiter right now.
    Reply
  • jimslaid2
    Joeman, most users are not you.
    Reply
  • "Prerendering kicks in as soon as a user begins typing in the URL bar of the browser and Chrome auto-completes a site's address and determines high likelihood that the site is the intended destination."

    I stopped using Google Chrome after following incident:

    I was browsing the web, something related to artificial intelligence, and I was typing the actual address of the web site in the address bar. Without looking I pressed ENTER. What happened is that Chrome, instead of taking me to the web site, decided that I was looking for something else and took me to the web site which turned out to be brought down by my government due to pedofile content! It was not even close to what I typed into address bar!

    It means that my government now probably has my IP and a record of me trying to access illegal web site.

    This "prerendering" thing, if I understood it correctly, means that Google Chrome is fetching web pages from many web sites that Google Chrome "thinks" you want to access.

    Good luck with that!
    Reply
  • kronos_cornelius
    You know this features means Google knows what you are going to do before you do.
    Reply