Perhaps their implementation differs, but they even showed the JS they're using to perform the prefetch in the post. It doesn't seem like they're trying to hide anything.
They kept the fact that they were going to deploy this on the search service that has a monopoly on search in EU secret until it was launched in Chrome. Before this, this link prefetching has seen very little use in the wild.
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I'm confused, isn't it an open standard? http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/links.html#link...
Perhaps their implementation differs, but they even showed the JS they're using to perform the prefetch in the post. It doesn't seem like they're trying to hide anything.
They kept the fact that they were going to deploy this on the search service that has a monopoly on search in EU secret until it was launched in Chrome. Before this, this link prefetching has seen very little use in the wild.
They don't have to tell anyone what they're doing. As cmelbye stated, it's an open standard. Other browsers can implement it if they wish.