This paper provides a synopsis of a server-driven link prefetching mechanism that we have designed and implemented for the Mozilla web browser, a popular Open Source web browser. The mechanism depends on the origin server or an intermediate proxy server determining the best set of documents for the browser to prefetch. The browser follows prefetch directives provided by the server, either embedded in an HTML document using the < LINK > tag or specified via Link HTTP response headers. The browser determines when best to prefetch the specified URLs based on its own heuristics. In this paper, we describe the mechanism and discuss some of the practical issues that impacted its design and implementation.
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