PodRocket

Speeding up the web with the speculation rules API | Barry Pollard

November 6th, 2025  |  44 mins 33 secs

chrome, speculation rules, web perf optimization

Barry Pollard from the Chrome devrel team joins PodRocket to discuss the speculation rules API, a new browser feature designed to improve web performance through prefetch and pre-render techniques. Barry breaks down the history of speculative loading, contrasts SPA vs MPA behavior, and explains the nuances of hover prefetching, conservative prefetch, and the powerful new pre-render until script mode. Learn how Shopify and WordPress are adopting the API, what telemetry from Chrome Status reveals, and what developers need to know about potential pitfalls, caching behavior, and how the API is becoming a standard for static sites and e-commerce performance.