Chrome recently updated to version 56 on the stable channel, and the update brings a few new features with it, but under the hood tweaks such as faster and more efficient reloads are the star of the show this time around. To be precise, the Chromium blog states that reloading in the newest version of Chrome has been improved to offer up to 28% faster reloads, and part of speeding those reloads up is sending about 60% fewer validation requests, which makes the reloads much more power and network efficient. On mobile networks, this improved speed and efficiency results in less data and battery usage, as well.
When you reload a page, a number of validation requests are sent out, usually across multiple domains. These requests are basically your browser asking if resources it has on a given page are still acceptable to use. Reloads in the newest version of Chrome send out a far reduced number of these requests, opting instead to validate only whatever the browser dubs the main resource of a page. This results in a more efficient reloading process that’s built for today’s somewhat more reliable web, where connections are less often responsible for breaking pages that should otherwise work. The simpler reload process pulls new information, if it’s present, and otherwise mostly leaves the page alone.
While the benefits of this new reloading process can be felt most strongly on mobile devices, users of desktop versions of Chrome can expect to see a bit of a boost, as well. The more efficient process will also help just a bit with Chrome’s battery usage on laptops. Since desktop pages can be a bit more complex than mobile pages, however, broken pages could happen a bit more often. If the new reload process does not catch any errors, holding down the shift key while reloading a page will cause Chrome to do a hard refresh, which ditches all assets for a page and loads it afresh. On a mobile device, broken pages are a bit more rare, but if one is encountered, typing “javascript:location.reload(true)”, sans quotation marks, into the address bar will force a hard reload of the current page.