Connectivity cloud company Cloudfare unveiled Speed Brain, a new product that works with web browsers to speed up webpages by 45% for free.
Speed Brain aims to eliminate load times by predicting the next page users will visit and downloading a webpage to the browser cache before they navigate it.
Cloudflare explains how Speed Brain works:
The new Speed Brain feature prefetches the content of the page a user is most likely to visit next.
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Currently, this is done conservatively by speculating the next page a user will visit when their cursor hovers over a link or starts to click.
In the coming months and into 2025, Cloudflare will offer more aggressive predictions using machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict the next page a user will visit based on previous web traffic and requests.
For example, Speed Brain enabled on an e-commerce website selling clothing will use insights from previous web requests to predict that a typical visitor is likely to click on “Shirts” when viewing the parent page “Mens > Clothes”.
Based on this, Speed Brain can start delivering static content, like images, before the user even clicks the “Shirts” link.
As a result, when the user clicks “Shirts,” the page loads instantly.
This prediction is made possible by the Chrome Speculation-Rules API, and Cloudflare’s massive global network that sits between clients and servers.
“By turning on Speed Brain, Cloudflare has made millions of web pages nearly 50 percent faster – instantly. That means Internet users across the world can browse, communicate, learn, and work faster and more reliably,” claimed Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince.
“We believe that no one should have to pay to speed up their webpage, and that Internet users deserve the fastest experience possible. While many have attempted to reduce or eliminate load times, Cloudflare is in a unique position to actually make it happen instantly for the significant portion of the Internet that uses our network.”
“The machine learning optimisations in the works will take even more burden off site owners, and make so much of the Internet faster for so many more people,” added Google web performance developer advocate Barry Pollard.
Speed Brain is available with all Cloudflare plans immediately and for free; Speed Brain is currently enabled by default to millions of domains on Cloudflare’s Free plan. Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans can be enabled manually with one click. Speed Brain is for Chromium-based web browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.