Cloudflare has announced Speed Brain, a new product that works with some of the most popular web browsers to speed up how webpages load by up to 45% faster, for free. Speed Brain aims to eliminate load times completely by predicting the next page a user will visit, and downloading a webpage to the browser cache before a user navigates to it. Now websites using Cloudflare will load faster than ever before, almost instantly.
As the web has evolved, speed has been one of the most critical factors to improve online experiences – the Internet has matured from waiting minutes to download a song, to 100 milliseconds feeling “instant” enough for an ideal browsing experience. One of the remaining roadblocks to fast load times is the delay of downloading certain pieces of a webpage – from HTML files to static images – when visiting a website. Speed Brain aims to eliminate this wait time completely and render pages instantly.
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“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,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “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.”
Cloudflare’s new Speed Brain feature prefetches the content of the page a user is most likely to visit next. 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 ecommerce website selling clothing will use insights from previous web requests to predict with high accuracy 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 innovation is made possible by the Chrome Speculation-Rules API, and Cloudflare’s massive global network that sits between clients and servers, making it well positioned to speculate.
“Cloudflare has built a reputation in the industry as the experts in speed, and in helping to make the Internet better for everyone,” said Barry Pollard, Web Performance Developer Advocate, Google. “Our team is excited to see a company like Cloudflare jump at the chance to make browsing experiences so much faster for so many people right off the bat by using the Speculation-Rules API, in such a simple way for site owners. The machine learning optimizations in the works will take even more burden off site owners, and make so much of the Internet faster for so many more people.”
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.
