Private prefetch proxy in Chrome

Starting with Chrome 103 for Android, Chrome will gradually roll out a private prefetch proxy feature to speed up out-going navigations from Google Search and other participating websites by 30% at the median. This private prefetch proxy feature allows the prefetching of cross-origin content without exposing user information to the destination website until the user navigates.

Read on to learn about how this feature works,
how it can help significantly improve your sites’ Largest Contentful Paint (LCP),
or how referrer websites can help their users achieve their goals by speeding up cross-site navigations.

# How Private Prefetch Proxy works

# Secure communication channel

This feature uses a CONNECT proxy to establish a secure communication channel between Chrome and the server hosting the content to be prefetched. This secure communication channel prevents the proxy from inspecting any data transfer. Notably, while Private Prefetch Proxy necessarily sees the host name in order to establish a secure communication channel, it does not see the full URLs, nor the resources themselves.

In addition, because the secure communication channel is encrypted end-to-end, intermediaries can neither observe the host names, nor the content of the prefetched sites. Finally, the proxy inherently prevents the destination server from seeing the user’s IP address.

# Preventing user identification

Beyond the network aspects detailed earlier, we also need to prevent servers from identifying a user at prefetch time, via information previously stored on their device. To that end, Chrome currently restricts the usage of Private Prefetch Proxy to websites for which the user has no cookies or other local state. Here are the restrictions for prefetch requests made via Private Prefetch Proxy:

• Cookies: Prefetch requests are not allowed to carry cookies.
  • If there is a cookie for a resource, Chrome will make an uncredentialed fetch but will not use the response (see later Caching section).
  • Although responses to a prefetch request can include cookies, these cookies will only be saved if the user navigates to the prefetched page.
• Fingerprinting: Other surfaces which could be used for fingerprinting are also adjusted. For example, the User-Agent header sent by prefetch proxy only carries limited information.

In the future, we hope to expand Private Prefetch Proxy to links with cookies or local state while maintaining the same privacy characteristics. See the What’s next section for more details.

# Caching

Chrome will prefetch resources even if they are already in the cache, but they will not carry any conditional headers such as ETag or If-Modified-Since (these contain server-set values which could be used for tracking even without cookies). This prefetching is done to prevent leaking a client’s cache state to the prefetched website. In addition, Chrome will only commit a prefetched resource to the cache if the user decides to navigate to the prefetched website.

# Getting started with private prefetch proxy

# For website owners

There is no action required from website owners to start benefiting from private prefetch proxy on links for which the user has no cookies or local state. From our experiments, this is a significant opportunity for most websites. Besides, it’s always a good idea to impress first-time visitors or infrequent visitors with a super fast loading experience. From past experiments, we’ve seen between 20% to 30% faster Largest Contentful Paint on prefetched navigations.

In the future, we hope to expand this feature to links with cookies or local state while maintaining its privacy characteristics. The challenge with cookies is that they might be used to alter the user experience in hard to predict ways. So, website owners will most likely have to opt in or adjust their site to benefit from Private Prefetch Proxy for links with cookies.

Concretely, while the prefetch requests will remain uncredentialed, the web page will gain access to cookies, and other local state, when the user navigates to it. Developers could take advantage of this to add back the personalization and changes based on cookies or local state. Or perhaps, developers might also be interested in declaring certain resources as perfectly fine to prefetch and use as is, without cookies (that is, resources that don’t depend on any cookies). Please have a look at the What’s next section to learn more and inform our plan.

# Geo-dependent content or services

If your website behaves differently (for example, different content, or selective access) across markets based on the user’s IP address, you may wonder how to handle Private Prefetch Proxy’s prefetch requests. It’s important to know that Private Prefetch Proxy is powered by several servers spread across the globe, and that the IP of the proxy will geolocate to the country from which the user initiated a prefetch.

So, with that in mind, here is what we recommend:

1. Identify prefetch requests from Private Prefetch Proxy by the presence of a Sec-Purpose: Prefetch; anonymous-client-ip HTTP header.
2. Lookup the geolocation of the Private Prefetch Proxy that issued the request via its IP address. See this resource for an up-to-date list of rolled-out geographies and the corresponding IP addresses.
3. Serve resources in accordance with the market attached to this particular geolocation.

# Traffic control

From past experiments, we know that this feature typically results in less than 2% extra requests for main resources (for example HTML documents). That said, if you are the cautious kind, you can use the traffic advice’s fraction field to control how much Private Prefetch Proxy should let through. You can start with a small fraction such as 0.3 (that is, 30%), and gradually increase it to 1.0 (that is, 100%).

The fraction field gives you control over the prefetch traffic by specifying how much Private Prefetch Proxy should let through. The value is a float between 0.0 (no prefetch at all) and 1.0 (100% of the prefetch requests get through).

For more flexibility (for example, a sudden peak of heavy access), you may want to temporarily reject prefetch requests (Sec-Purpose: prefetch;anonymous-client-ip) with a 503 status code, and by setting the Cache-Control: no-store header on the response. You may also add the Retry-After header to tell Chrome how long to wait before retrying prefetch requests.

# For referrer website owners

If you operate a website with lots of links to other websites, you may be interested in using the Private Prefetch Proxy feature to speed up these cross-origin navigations. You will need to add speculation rules to your pages for Chrome to know which page you believe it should prefetch via Private Prefetch Proxy. Here is a simple example:

<script type="speculationrules">
{
"prefetch": ,
"requires": 
]
}
</script>

# What’s next?

This launch is only a first step. We hope to expand and improve this feature based on the community’s interest and feedback. For instance, we would love feedback on how to expand to links with cookies and local state in a way that minimizes developer friction, or ways to make this feature more useful for referrer websites.

# Read more

• Prefetch proxy for network administrators.
• WICG github repository for efforts related to navigation speculation.
• Chromium blog in which the private prefetch proxy concept was originally introduced.