Long ago, Google offered a Windows software called Web Accelerator that was designed to make web pages load faster in your browser.

Among other things, Google Web Accelerator would pre-fetch certain pages in advance in the background - like the top three links on a Google page - and the corresponding pages would thus load instantly as soon as you click on them.

Google discontinued the development of Web Accelerator in early 2008 but some of that functionality has just been added to Google Chrome with Instant Pages.

Google Instant Pages

Google has gotten much better at predicting what we are looking for - you know how accurate Google Instant and Google Suggest are – and with Instant Pages, they prefetch the links on a search page that you are most likely to click and makes them available in the background. If you happen to click on one of these links, the pages would load with the blink of an eye.

You can currently test Instant Pages on Google.com using the dev version of Google Chrome but going forward, the functionality can be extended to other sites as well.

The following video compares the speed of loading web pages with and without Instant Pages. If you have a website, use this sample page to test how your web pages might look inside Chrome with prefetching enabled.