[ronnoch]

In order to be instant, it would have to download all images, scripts and stylesheets too - wouldn't that screw up everyone's web stats?

[abarth]

Here's the design document: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerende...

The browser does download subresources, including images, scripts, and stylesheets. The new page visibility API is intended to help folks keep accurate web stats:

http://w3c-test.org/webperf/specs/PageVisibility/

[alexmuller]

Does this mean analytics providers are scrambling to implement this API before the Chrome build goes stable?

[dangrossman]

So yes, this will screw up web stats. A new JS API won't help with anything server side, and there's going to be a significant lag before every web app in the world is updated. Think about preloading anything that keeps track of read/unread status as well (e-mail, forum threads, etc).