And the industry at large has completely disregarded browsers and demoted them to being mere thin clients for accessing applications. Just why can't we improve

And the industry at large has completely disregarded browsers and demoted them to being mere thin clients for accessing applications. Just why can't we improve the user agent instead of turning every website into an app that does its own thing to provide the UX? For example: > We can kick off requests as soon as the user first touches (or hovers) the link instead There's no reason this couldn't be built-in to the user agent. It could very well pre-load pages before you even start scrolling around, or it could start loading as soon as you hover, or it could start loading as soon as you click. I get to decide, because I can configure my UA. People on data caps will be happy to turn it off. Meanwhile you can optimize your ugly slow service so that it processes requests fast enough that you don't need these hacks.. > We can provide better visual feedback that loading is taking place Usually I get either crickets or a spinner or something went wrong if it's the javascript doing this. Again I think it is the user agent's place to give the user visual feedback (according to their configuration). I'd turn them off, because they're not useful. I'd rather have you spend time making your ugly slow service faster than implementing transition animations to "hide" the latency.