Here’s another little gem for you HTML5 fans out there – link prefetching. Adding the following HTML meta or link tags will result in the target being loaded in the background after your current page.

<link rel="prefetch" href="/images/big.jpeg">
or
<link rel="next" href="2.html">
or
<meta http-equiv="Link" content="/images/big.jpeg" rel=prefetch">

Both prefetch and next are accepted in the rel attribute.

Here are a few advantages of using this method:

• It’s HTML compliant
• It’ll dramatically speed up the resulting page/file if successfully prefetched
• It doesn’t slow current page load
• No same-origin restriction – any domain is accepted

There are also several limitations that should be noted:

• Firefox only (for now)
• Only HTTP protocol is accepted
• No URLs with querystrings accepted

To learn more about link prefetching check out the Link Prefetching FAQ at Mozilla Developer Center