Among other great features, HTML5 introduces prefetching, the art of loading pages before the user requested them.
What is prefetching, and why it is useful
According to whatwg.org, rel=prefetch "indicates that preemptively fetching and caching the specified resource is likely to be beneficial, as it is highly likely that the user will require this resource." Search engines sometimes add
to the search results page if they feel that the top result is wildly more popular than any other.
For example: using Firefox, search Google for CNN; view source; search for the keyword "prefetch".
As loading time is a very important factor of a website quality, prefetching can definitely improve the user experience by loading pages before the user actually requested them. Of course, you have to be careful (Don’t prefetch your entire website!) but prefetching is definitely a feature that will make the web a better place.
Prefetching pages with HTML5
Prefetching pages is super easy to implement. The only thing you have to do is to place the following code with the and tags of your page. The href attribute have to contain the url of the page to prefetch.