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Andrew Ferenci |
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Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them
I recently thought about how not too long ago, I was using dial-up and Netscape Navigator waiting several minutes for webpages to load up. When I step back and think about how fast browsing the web has become. It’s really fucking fast :)
The reasons are due to obvious advancements in bandwidth and computing hardware but also because modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome fetch and load web pages much more quickly using a nifty thing called DNS pre-resolution.
The process of translating a web address into an IP address through a DNS lookup, or vice versa is often called resolving.
How does this work in layman’s terms? You enter a URL and the web browser looks up the IP address using a DNS. This is very similar to you looking for the phone number (i.e. IP address) for your favorite restaurant (i.e. URL) in the yellowpages (i.e. DNS).
With DNS pre-resolution, a browser like Google Chrome will simultaneously look up all the other links on the web page and pre-resolve those links into IP addresses in the background. So when you click on one of the links on the page, the browser is ready to take you to the new page instantly.
This is especially impressive because web browsers are learning from past web visits so the next time you go to a web page that you’ve previously visited, it automatically pre-resolves all the relevant links and elements on the website.
What does this mean for the future?
I think that in a few years, browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox will be able to predict not only which links to pre-resolve, but also which images and videos to pre-fetch ahead of time. That will make the web hyper fast because its all occuring before the page loads.
Soon enough we’ll be clicking through webpages loaded with images and video as fast as flipping through pages of a magazine.