How about this: There's a warehouse 'owner' internal to the browser (and not exposed to pages/extension), who 'remembers' the resources the browser has, and th

How about this: There's a warehouse 'owner' internal to the browser (and not exposed to pages/extension), who 'remembers' the resources the browser has, and the times it took to access them (for commonly-accessed resources). When a page requests the cached resource, the owner 'returns' the resource with a delay of whatever the original access time was, fudged around by some noise. A weakness of this would be that websites would be able to 'communicate' with each other by engineering response times to your browser, and then checking how long it takes your browser to access that. But this is a different scenario than random websites trying to figure out where else you've been: here the pages need to be in collusion with each other. The servers might try to use fancy algorithms to try to figure out if you're using cached versions by hitting different distributed servers and figuring out if the resource load time is an outlier. But that's prone to a lot of noise and other issues, and lesser of an issue than the original concern. Right? This obviously won't help with page load speeds, but will help network load for bot users and servers. One possible issue might be: if you've been in a slow connection previously, all your connections will seem slow even after you are in a faster connection. For that, you can just purge the cache and force the browser to reload the resources. Edited for formatting.