Cloudflare makes a quantum leap in everyday web performance for millions of Internet users

Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, has unveiled Speed Brain, a groundbreaking product designed to accelerate webpage load times by up to 45% for free. This innovative tool works with popular web browsers to predict the next page a user is likely to visit, preloading the webpage into the browser cache before the user navigates to it. With Speed Brain, websites utilizing Cloudflare will experience faster loading times than ever before, achieving near-instantaneous page renders.

The Importance of Speed in Online Experiences:

As the internet has evolved, speed has become a critical factor in enhancing online experiences. The transition from waiting minutes to download content to a browsing experience where 100 milliseconds feels "instant" reflects this evolution. One of the key challenges remaining is the delay in downloading various components of a webpage, such as HTML files and static images. Speed Brain aims to eliminate this wait time entirely, allowing webpages to load instantly.

Key Features of Speed Brain:

• Instant Load Times:

  • “By activating Speed Brain, Cloudflare has made millions of web pages nearly 50% faster—instantly. This improvement means internet users worldwide can browse, communicate, learn, and work more quickly and reliably,” stated Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.

• Predictive Prefetching:

  • Speed Brain prefetches content from the page users are likely to visit next. Initially, this is done conservatively by speculating the next page based on cursor movement over links. In the coming months, Cloudflare plans to implement more aggressive predictions using machine learning and AI, enhancing the accuracy of these forecasts based on previous web traffic patterns.

• Enhanced User Experience:

  • For instance, on an eCommerce site, Speed Brain can anticipate that a user viewing ‘Mens > Clothes’ is likely to click on ‘Shirts’ and start preloading relevant images. As a result, when the user clicks the ‘Shirts’ link, the page loads instantly. This innovation utilizes the Chrome Speculation-Rules API and Cloudflare’s vast global network, optimally positioned to predict user behavior.

Industry Recognition:

“Cloudflare has built a reputation as the speed experts, significantly enhancing the Internet for everyone,” remarked Barry Pollard, Web Performance Developer Advocate at Google. “We are thrilled to see Cloudflare leveraging the Speculation-Rules API to expedite browsing experiences and make the Internet faster for millions of users.”

Availability:

Speed Brain is available immediately across all Cloudflare plans and is offered for free. It is currently enabled by default for millions of domains on Cloudflare’s Free plan. Users on Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans can activate Speed Brain with a single click. This feature is compatible with Chromium-based web browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.