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103 Early Hints for Navigation

Category
Performance
Type
Chromium catches up
Status
Enabled by default (Chrome 103)
Intent stage
Prepare to ship

Summary

Support 103 Early Hints informational responses during top-level frame navigation. When a 103 response includes link headers Chromium tries to preload specified resources (including modulepreload) or preconnect to specified origins before the final response is received. This gives Web developers a way to optimize Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

Motivation

A few months ago, we announced a collaborative experiment [1] to measure the potential impact of 103 early hints. The results indicate that Early Hints could result in speed improvements on the order of a few hundred milliseconds (the sample size is a bit small though). Given these encouraging results, we are now moving forward with the next steps, starting with this intent to prototype. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/early-hints.md

Standards & signals

Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gCh_CnfrJq_VL7aGoq6skc7sn4yn5pKsM0gkHe5B9go/edit?usp=sharing

Samples: https://early-hints.fastlylabs.com/

Explainers: https://github.com/bashi/early-hints-explainer/blob/main/explainer.md

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