4 ms·

I think rather than waste bandwidth and fight for those last 80ms, we should fix sites that take multiple seconds to load. Especially after the first load — sub

by jwr 6y ago

I think rather than waste bandwidth and fight for those last 80ms, we should fix sites that take multiple seconds to load. Especially after the first load — subsequent pages should load instantly. In general, it's 2020, and if every click on your site takes 5 seconds, something is very wrong.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
It makes a big difference and doesn't only help websites that take seconds to load. Just look at its hover->click speed demo on the landing page. I'm getting 500ms+ if I click it casually like I do most links. All of that time could be spent loading the next page. https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ (blog platform) does prefetching to great effect. The onus is on you to decide if this would create a bunch of false positive prefetches for your desktop users, like if your website was a bunch of densely packed links. You could also scope this to prefetch only a subset of links. But your users deserve more deliberation over their UX than a kneejerk yay/nay.
Thev00d00 6y ago
/me scowls at the Google Cloud console.
onion2k 6y ago
subsequent pages should load instantly Every page should load fast, obviously, but instantly means the data has to be prefetched and that's potentially a lot of data to download that the user might never actually need. That's a waste of everyone's bandwidth, especially on mobile. Pages that a user will view (eg first page behind a login), or that they're very likely to view (eg top result in a search), should be prefetched/prerendered but whether you should prefetch more than that requires thought and measurement.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  A great stimulus for "thought and measurement" would be user feedback. If users could see who wastes their data plan as easily as they can see who eats their battery, this would change the picture. Browser vendors should implement per-site traffic breakdown.
- esperent 6y ago
  As far as I know this only preloads HTML. For the majority of sites, that's not going to cause a huge increase in data use. Most page's html is only a couple of kb.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Taking this story on HN as an example, the HTML is about 20kb right now. If you prefetched every story on the front page that would be 600kb. And if you read HN as much as I doing that could be gigabytes every day.
    - esperent 6y ago
      From my understanding that's not how this tool works (admittedly it's a while since I examined it deeply). It waits for a mouse hover over a link and then preloads that link only. Unless it's been terribly abused, there's no way it should preload all the links on a page.
      - porker 6y ago
        You are correct about how it works.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
perryizgr8 6y ago
> waste bandwidth > it's 2020 Hmmm... I actually have stopped worrying about bandwidth completely in 2020. My home and mobile connections have virtually unlimited data. I cannot finish them if I tried. It's amazing to see tech like this that leverages the excess data I have and converts that into speed.
- can16358p 6y ago
  Lucky for you, but that's not really the case for everybody. For instance, I have 35GB mobile cap and 100GB home cap. While I'd love to see a faster experience while clicking links, it would be considerably wasting bandwidth if all sites implemented that. And this is just the user side: I'm not even getting into the excess load on the server side.
- donbrae 6y ago
  Doesn't bandwidth usage have an environmental impact? The effect of pre-fetching HTML would be negligible, however.
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> ...that take multiple seconds to load. I think you mean "minutes". Open the developer tools and prepare to be surprised how long the average site takes to get to the "everything loaded" state. P.S. I'm only slightly exaggerating. There's an awful lot of bullshit being loaded behind the scenes on the average site. Good thing I'm not using a weak Internet connection.

by jwr 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

It makes a big difference and doesn't only help websites that take seconds to load. Just look at its hover->click speed demo on the landing page. I'm getting 500ms+ if I click it casually like I do most links. All of that time could be spent loading the next page. https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ (blog platform) does prefetching to great effect. The onus is on you to decide if this would create a bunch of false positive prefetches for your desktop users, like if your website was a bunch of densely packed links. You could also scope this to prefetch only a subset of links. But your users deserve more deliberation over their UX than a kneejerk yay/nay.

Thev00d00 6y ago

/me scowls at the Google Cloud console.

onion2k 6y ago

subsequent pages should load instantly Every page should load fast, obviously, but instantly means the data has to be prefetched and that's potentially a lot of data to download that the user might never actually need. That's a waste of everyone's bandwidth, especially on mobile. Pages that a user will view (eg first page behind a login), or that they're very likely to view (eg top result in a search), should be prefetched/prerendered but whether you should prefetch more than that requires thought and measurement.

ComodoHacker 6y ago
A great stimulus for "thought and measurement" would be user feedback. If users could see who wastes their data plan as easily as they can see who eats their battery, this would change the picture. Browser vendors should implement per-site traffic breakdown.
esperent 6y ago
As far as I know this only preloads HTML. For the majority of sites, that's not going to cause a huge increase in data use. Most page's html is only a couple of kb.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Taking this story on HN as an example, the HTML is about 20kb right now. If you prefetched every story on the front page that would be 600kb. And if you read HN as much as I doing that could be gigabytes every day.
  - esperent 6y ago
    From my understanding that's not how this tool works (admittedly it's a while since I examined it deeply). It waits for a mouse hover over a link and then preloads that link only. Unless it's been terribly abused, there's no way it should preload all the links on a page.
    - porker 6y ago
      You are correct about how it works.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

perryizgr8 6y ago

> waste bandwidth > it's 2020 Hmmm... I actually have stopped worrying about bandwidth completely in 2020. My home and mobile connections have virtually unlimited data. I cannot finish them if I tried. It's amazing to see tech like this that leverages the excess data I have and converts that into speed.

can16358p 6y ago
Lucky for you, but that's not really the case for everybody. For instance, I have 35GB mobile cap and 100GB home cap. While I'd love to see a faster experience while clicking links, it would be considerably wasting bandwidth if all sites implemented that. And this is just the user side: I'm not even getting into the excess load on the server side.
donbrae 6y ago
Doesn't bandwidth usage have an environmental impact? The effect of pre-fetching HTML would be negligible, however.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

> ...that take multiple seconds to load. I think you mean "minutes". Open the developer tools and prepare to be surprised how long the average site takes to get to the "everything loaded" state. P.S. I'm only slightly exaggerating. There's an awful lot of bullshit being loaded behind the scenes on the average site. Good thing I'm not using a weak Internet connection.