`<link rel="prefetch">`

[jakearchibald]

Spun out from #1106

Specification

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#link-type-prefetch

web-feature

https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/features/link-rel-prefetch/

Test Links

https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=prefetch

[tunetheweb]

We should agree whether the scope of this includes document prefetches or only sub-resource prefetches. See prior work at whatwg/html#6723.

With the Speculation Rules API (see Interop proposal #1081) concentrating on documents (and offering more features for those) and it having been partially upstreamed to HTML, it may be better to limit this older prefetch to sub-resources.

[wpt-interop]

Thank you for proposing <link rel="prefetch"> for Interop 2026.

We want to let you know it was not selected to be part of Interop this year.

On behalf of the entire Interop team, thank you for submitting it for consideration. We got many more proposals than we could include in this year's project, necessitating some difficult choices. Please note this should not be taken as a comment on the technology as a whole, or our willingness to consider it for Interop in the future. We appreciate the work you put into your proposal, and would welcome your participation in future rounds of Interop.

Posted on behalf of the Interop team.