Well, you might have to wait for Instant Restaurants and Instant Elevators, but Instant Pages is available today in the latest beta release of Chrome. Thanks to Chrome’s new prerendering technology, some Google.com search results will appear to load almost instantly after you click on them. You can see this feature in action in the following video:
Although Google.com is the most high-profile site to use this new prerendering technology, it can be used by other sites since it’s been designed as a web standard. Web developers interested in learning more can see our post in the Chromium blog.
We’ve added a few more features in this release that users have been eagerly awaiting for some time. First, we’ve added some awesome to the omnibox by suggesting partial matches for URLs and page titles from your browsing 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.”
Second, we’re happy to announce that issue number 173 in our public bug database, which has collected more than 900 “stars” from users around the world since it was filed in 2008, has been implemented on Windows and Linux (the Mac version is coming soon). That’s right--we’ve finally added Print Preview! Print Preview uses Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer to display the page you want to print, and it updates automatically as you adjust your print settings. You can also choose to save any web page as a PDF file, using the “Print to PDF” option that’s automatically included in the printer list. Thanks for being patient with us on this one!
