Here's a quick tip for Google Chrome users that might help speed up your web browsing: Prefetch/preload web pages. When this feature is on, Chrome will preload pages it thinks you will visit (likely based on mouse movements).
From what I can see, this feature is only available in Chrome (no other Chromium browsers like Edge or Brave) and I don't see a similar feature in Firefox.
You can turn it on by going to chrome://settings/cookies in your address bar, or by choosing Settings – Privacy and security – Cookies and other site data. There, you'll see an option called "Preload pages for faster browsing and searching".
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You might already have the option enabled, but you also might notice that it's greyed out and not able to be toggled. If that's the case, it's due to an installed extension. For me, it was initially greyed out because I had uBlock Origin (an ad blocker) installed. So you might have a similar problem with another extension. For what it's worth, it's not greyed out when using Ad Block Plus.
I haven't tried this preload feature myself so I really don't know if it makes a huge difference. You can try it out and see if you notice an improvement. I saw the tip in
this Twitter thread by Tessa Davis, which includes a number of other Chrome performance suggestions that you might want to try.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
