Does link prefetching work with target="_blank"?

[googlechromelabs]

Does link prefetching work with target="_blank"?

[mherchel]

No, Quicklink will pull down those links assuming they're in the same domain. You can view the network tab within your browser's developer tools to view the files that are being pulled down.

[demianrenzulli]

Hey guys, I'll add my response and close the issue, let me know if you need any other clarifications:

Quicklink does work for _target="blank". The only caveat is that, if you are opening links from a different origin, you should allow them when calling quicklink.listen().

Testing this is a bit tricky, because when you open a new tab in Chrome, by default DevTools is not opened. For that reason that request is not recorded in the Network tab.
Fortunately, there's an option "Auto open DevTools for popups", in DevTools settings (that you can access by clicking on the 3 points at the corner of DevTools). That would allow you to see the prefetch links being picked up from the prefetch cache when you click on any of these links.

Here is a demo:

1. Open this site in Chrome. The demo contains two links wtih target="_blank", for same and cross origin respectively.
2. Reload the page, and check the Network tab, to see that both links are prefetched.
3. Click no any of them. If you enabled the option mentioned before in DevTools, you'll see the links being picked up from he prefetch cache, instead of the network.

Cheers.