WordPress Latest Plugin Is Chromium Only (For Now)
A handy plugin by WordPress has been released, which can help to decrease the loading time for your WordPress-powered website.
The only caveat is that you will only see the results on two Chromium browsers.
The Speculation Rules API is a new web API that [...] allows defining rules to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of certain structure based on user interaction, in JSON syntax—or in other words, speculatively preload those URLs before the navigation. This API can be used, for example, to prerender any links on a page whenever the user hovers over them. Also, with the Speculation Rules API, “prerender” actually means to prerender the entire page, including running JavaScript. This can lead to near-instant load times once the user clicks on the link as the page would have most likely already been loaded in its entirety. [...]
While the Speculation Rules API has been available in Chrome and Edge since version 109 in general, the particular subfeature needed to unlock the aforementioned functionality is called “document rules”, which was only recently added in version 121. This post describes the latest enhancements to the API in more depth.
In other words, at the time of writing this post end users will need to use either Chrome 121+ or Edge 121+ to get the benefits of this feature. However there are no adverse effects for users on other browsers, as this is a progressive enhancement. Therefore using the Speculation Rules API on your website is safe regardless of the user base. (Make WordPress Core)
While WordPress users are recommended to install the plugin, it is rather odd that only the top two Chromium browsers are initially supported.
As Speculative Loading was already being perfected by Mozilla, I am surprised why Firefox was not included on the list of compatible browsers for the plugin.
Firefox’s omission by WordPress could be due to the former’s market share, which according to Statcounter is surprisingly in fourth place (behind Chrome, Safari, & Microsoft Edge).
Hopefully, the Speculative Loading WordPress plugin will figure out how to work with non-Chromium browsers in the future, as many people enjoy experiencing the web outside of Google’s influence.
Note: Discovered via @martinibuster@mastodon.social on Search Engine Journal
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