Setting I changed to up my Chromebook's internet speed

One thing I have been noticing lately is that my Chromebook has been feeling slower and slower at loading web pages, I have always found Chrome is be slightly slower than my go-to browser (Firefox) but it was getting to the stage where some websites were taking 15+ seconds to load (and these weren't heavy websites).

Anyway I started looking for settings I could play with, I was fairly sure it wasn't my internet, all other devices via WiFi were working as expected and it didn't appear to be any specific websites that were slow.

One setting that was checked, and I can't remember if I checked it some time ago or if it was a default setting was "Predict network actions to improve page load performance".

Now you would think this would speed up the loading of websites, but for whatever reason when I turned this off and performed a restart the web started to feel way faster!

What does Predict network actions to improve page load performance do?

I did some digging to see what Predict network actions to improve page load performance was doing and according to Google;

When a website is confident about predicting what link you might click next, the site can tell Google Chrome to pre-load, or "prerender," the links, so the page loads instantly when you click it. For example, when you’re browsing a blog, you might click “next post” when you’re done reading. The blog can tell Google Chrome to pre-load the “next post,” so the page shows instantly when you click it.

When you're typing a web address in the omnibox, if Chrome has high confidence with which site you're likely to visit based on your local history, Chrome will begin to prerender that page. This will make the page show up faster when you hit enter.

So what I guess was happening was Chrome was firing off requests to other pages on the sites I was visiting and for whatever reason was letting them take preference.

I don't know if this is a common bug or just an oddity with my machine. A quick search doesn't show that it is a widespread problem at least.