As with most of these clever under-the-hood type changes, it's hard to describe just how much this will improve your browsing experience, but I'm going to try.
Basically, pre-connection opens an HTTP (or HTTPS) connection to a search engine before you've finished typing your query into the Chrome address bar (Omnibox). With the socket already open to Google (or Yahoo, or...) your complete search term can be quickly transmitted. Like the clever DNS pre-fetching already present in stable builds of Chrome, we're probably looking at significant speed-ups of half a second or more. Neat.
If that wasn't cool enough, the same patch includes pre-connection to 'subresources, such as images'.
Read more: DownloadSquad