Google has begun work on a feature to let Chrome load pages before they're needed, the latest instance of the company's relentless focus on Web performance.

The work, described briefly in the Chrome issue tracker, said the project to "pre-load pages in background tabs for 'wicked fast' page loads" is scheduled to arrive in the browser's code base in February. The very early stages of work has begun: support for an eventual option to enable testing the feature through Chrome's "about:flags" interface.

With Chrome's tabbed browsing interface, multiple pages can be loaded into separate memory compartments simultaneously. A background tab, presumably, is one that's in use but hidden from the user interface. When a person clicks on a preloaded Web page, the browser could simply activate the page rather than load it.

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20022169-264.html