3 ms·

2 decades ago there was a product whose name escapes me. It was a tool to speed up web browsing, but instead of preloading which link it thought you were about

2 decades ago there was a product whose name escapes me. It was a tool to speed up web browsing, but instead of preloading which link it thought you were about to click next, it simply started preloading all the hyperlinks on the webpage.

blhack 6y ago
Some of us just used to include the next images as 1px squares to speed up loading of images that the user might click on next. Back then the images really were the only big bandwidth hog.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Back then one of the common mistakes used to be taking a huge image and "resize" it with "width" and "height" attributes on the img tag. It still is, but it used to too.
josefrichter 6y ago
I think this was available as browser extension. Maybe still is.
judge2020 6y ago
Sounds like AMP :) RES for Reddit also has an option that preloads every post that shows on the page for instant loading at the cost of bandwidth (I had an increase of ~100gb for one month)
tribby 6y ago
I wonder if you're thinking of netzero - IIRC they did this after they became a paid service, to market their 56k offering against early DSL
laumars 6y ago
And didn’t that get people into trouble in corporate networks because some of the links it followed were links the user would never have clicked on. I vaguely recall that problem arising in the late 90s / early 00s.
- JimDabell 6y ago
  It was a recurring problem in the Rails world because the reaction from DHH was to tell people the preloaders were "evil" instead of telling people to follow the HTTP specification. http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-accelerator-vs-unsafe-linking-round-two.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-accelera...
  - rimliu 6y ago
    It was a problem everywhere and in no way specific to RoR. If anything, RoR were one of the first more or less mainstream framewors to solve a lot of common problems then (CSRF, HTML spec only having "GET" and "POST" for form method attribute, etc.)
    - JimDabell 6y ago
      It wasn’t a problem everywhere. It was only a problem where people used GET in an unsafe way, which was a minority of sites. What makes Rails prominent in this was the creator of the framework blamed Google for their own bugs and told people to try to detect GWA to hide the links instead of telling people to follow the HTTP specification. People who followed his advice suffered the bug a second time, and people who ignored him and followed the HTTP specification avoided the problem.
      - laumars 6y ago
        It’s not just a problem with unsafe GET requests, it’s a problem for anyone who’s unfortunate enough to work in a company who logs web traffic (which was common practice back in the 90s / early 00s) and who happened to stumble on a site that might have hyperlinks to warez or porn (which, basically, could be any site with user generated content). I remember hearing several stories about employees getting reprimanded for accessing sites they never intended to visit. I also know of a similar tail when a national football team had their DNS hijacked and visitors were served porn instead of sports news (also happened around 2000 sort of time)
      - 6y ago
JimDabell 6y ago
There were quite a few of these in the late 90s, but I believe the most recent attempt at making a product out of this was the Google Web Accelerator about 15 years ago.
mwill 6y ago
I vaguely remember an add-on (For Mozilla browser??) that you could configure to preload links, that I used to preload pages of webcomics on my subpar childhood dial-up. I would open up the archive page, or first page, go do something else for a while, then start reading, and I would never catch up to the cache.

blhack 6y ago

Some of us just used to include the next images as 1px squares to speed up loading of images that the user might click on next. Back then the images really were the only big bandwidth hog.

rimliu 6y ago
Back then one of the common mistakes used to be taking a huge image and "resize" it with "width" and "height" attributes on the img tag. It still is, but it used to too.

josefrichter 6y ago

I think this was available as browser extension. Maybe still is.

judge2020 6y ago

Sounds like AMP :) RES for Reddit also has an option that preloads every post that shows on the page for instant loading at the cost of bandwidth (I had an increase of ~100gb for one month)

tribby 6y ago

I wonder if you're thinking of netzero - IIRC they did this after they became a paid service, to market their 56k offering against early DSL

laumars 6y ago

And didn’t that get people into trouble in corporate networks because some of the links it followed were links the user would never have clicked on. I vaguely recall that problem arising in the late 90s / early 00s.

JimDabell 6y ago
It was a recurring problem in the Rails world because the reaction from DHH was to tell people the preloaders were "evil" instead of telling people to follow the HTTP specification. http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-accelerator-vs-unsafe-linking-round-two.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-accelera...
- rimliu 6y ago
  It was a problem everywhere and in no way specific to RoR. If anything, RoR were one of the first more or less mainstream framewors to solve a lot of common problems then (CSRF, HTML spec only having "GET" and "POST" for form method attribute, etc.)
  - JimDabell 6y ago
    It wasn’t a problem everywhere. It was only a problem where people used GET in an unsafe way, which was a minority of sites. What makes Rails prominent in this was the creator of the framework blamed Google for their own bugs and told people to try to detect GWA to hide the links instead of telling people to follow the HTTP specification. People who followed his advice suffered the bug a second time, and people who ignored him and followed the HTTP specification avoided the problem.
    - laumars 6y ago
      It’s not just a problem with unsafe GET requests, it’s a problem for anyone who’s unfortunate enough to work in a company who logs web traffic (which was common practice back in the 90s / early 00s) and who happened to stumble on a site that might have hyperlinks to warez or porn (which, basically, could be any site with user generated content). I remember hearing several stories about employees getting reprimanded for accessing sites they never intended to visit. I also know of a similar tail when a national football team had their DNS hijacked and visitors were served porn instead of sports news (also happened around 2000 sort of time)
    - 6y ago

JimDabell 6y ago

There were quite a few of these in the late 90s, but I believe the most recent attempt at making a product out of this was the Google Web Accelerator about 15 years ago.

mwill 6y ago

I vaguely remember an add-on (For Mozilla browser??) that you could configure to preload links, that I used to preload pages of webcomics on my subpar childhood dial-up. I would open up the archive page, or first page, go do something else for a while, then start reading, and I would never catch up to the cache.