Chrome page reloads are speeding up.

In a Thursday post on the Chromium blog, Google Software Engineer Takashi Toyoshima announced a "relatively minor" browser tweak, which will result in pages reloading 28 percent faster in the latest version of Chrome.

Reload is a key feature of web browsers; it's typically used when a page is broken or to refresh content. When you reload a page, your browser will check with the web server if cached resources are still usable, a process called validation, Toyoshima explained.

"The existing reload behavior usually solves broken pages, but stale content is inefficiently addressed by a regular reload, especially on mobile," Toyoshima wrote. Meanwhile, broken pages are less of an issue these days compared to when the reload feature was original designed, since the quality of pages has gone up in that time.

"To improve the stale content use case, Chrome now has a simplified reload behavior to only validate the main resource and continue with a regular page load," Toyoshima wrote. "This new behavior maximizes the reuse of cached resources and results in lower latency, power consumption, and data usage." The changes result in 60 percent fewer validation requests, speeding up reloads.

To check out the difference, watch the video below.

In other browser news, Firefox and Chrome will now tell you if you're about to submit sensitive data to an insecure, non-HTTPS site, according to Ars Technica.

The feature is available on Firefox 51 and Chrome 56, both of which rolled out this week. On Firefox, you'll see a lock sign with a red line through it to the left of the address bar on pages delivered over the less-secure HTTP that include forms. Chrome, meanwhile, will display the words "Not secure" in the address bar.

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