Google is planning on bringing ‘Back Forward Cache’ for Chrome 86 for Android

Google is planning on bringing a useful new feature for Chrome users on Android. The search giant has announced ‘Back Forward Cache’ for Chrome 86 for Android. Although the company didn’t give us any details on the date of availability of the feature, since Chrome v86 is expected to be available for the general public in October this year, you can expect the feature to become available for everyone when Chrome 86 becomes available for the general public.

For those not who don’t know, Back Forward Cache feature cache pages in memory when the user navigates away — the trick here is to preserve the JavaScript & DOM state. According to Google, a Back Forward cache (bfcache) caches whole pages when navigating away from a page, so that the full state of the page can be restored when the user navigates back, thus making navigating back and forth very fast.

The feature will first be available for Chrome users on Android and will be made available for Chrome desktop version at a later date. Unfortunately, we don’t know as to when the Back Forward Cache feature will be available for Chrome desktop users.

• Here is our plan:
• Increase the size of the experiment with Google Search to further confirm some of the movement on key metrics and inform our roadmap of features and user journeys to support
• Short term:
• Launch BFCache for cross-origin navigations in M86
• Add support for same-origin navigations in a following milestone
• Longer term:
• Add support for more features to further increase BFCache’s hit rate, and add support for desktop platforms
• Work with Safari and Firefox, improve interop and standardize the behaviour.

Back Forward Cache feature is currently available behind a flag on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. So, if you can’t wait for the feature to officially become available for everyone, you can test the feature by enabling the Back Forward Cache flag.

via Techdows