Refreshing a Chrome browser is now around 28% faster than it used to be, thanks to new Google (GOOGL) updates that also mean users consume less bandwidth and power while surfing the web.
Facebook (FB) worked with Google and Firefox to help tackle the slow refresh problem, in what the Facebook blog described as “a great example of Facebook and browsers working together to quickly squash a bug.”
The changes have helped to dramatically improved page load times on the social media site.
In a blog post, Google’s Takashi Toyoshima explained how Chrome made the changes. “Users typically reload either because a page is broken or the content seems stale,” he wrote. “The existing reload behavior usually solves broken pages, but stale content is inefficiently addressed by a regular reload, especially on mobile.”
Toyoshima added: “To improve the stale content use case, Chrome now has a simplified reload behavior to only validate the main resource and continue with a regular page load. This new behavior maximizes the reuse of cached resources and results in lower latency, power consumption, and data usage.”
