Networking and navigation

New navigation features like network prioritization, prerendering and prefetching, and back navigation caching help your pages load faster in Internet Explorer 11.

Back navigation caching

By default, pages are unloaded from memory when you navigate away from them. Beginning with IE11, webpages that meet specific conditions are cached when the user navigates away. If the user later returns to the page, it's restored from the cache rather than reloaded from the server.

For more info, see "Back navigation caching".

Network prioritization

IE11 improves navigation performance by prioritizing network requests so webpages can display more quickly. In addition, web developers can delay loading individual resources so that other, more important resources load first.

To learn more, see "Network prioritization".

Prerendering and prefetching

Use prerender and prefetch in IE11 to improve your website's navigation. Prerender specifies a webpage to be loaded in the background while the user reads the current page and prefetch identifies resources to be loaded in the background. Because both features download content before it's needed, the resources are instantly available when needed by the user.

To learn more, see "Prerendering and prefetching".

TCP Connection Sharing

IE11 supports SPDY/3, a protocol that defines how to multiplex (combine) multiple HTTP requests into a single TCP connection. This can improve performance by reducing the number of separate TCP connections required to request a webpage.

For more info, see SPDY Protocol specification, draft 3.

Important  This feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7.