4 ms·

If you really care about details you should preload sidenotes and other links before I click on them. Most people (I) don’t care about bandwidth nearly as much

• gwern 5y ago
  But I do! Links are preloaded after about a second or so of hover; the delay is because I don't want to prefetch a lot of links when readers are just scrubbing over links or briefly previewing them. I've thought that it's still too aggressive since that's not a lot of time to even skim an annotation, but it's hard to know what is a good timeout there. (I'm not sure what you mean by 'sidenotes'; what we call sidenotes are just footnotes, which are of course at the bottom of the document and don't need to be 'loaded'.)
  • xixixao 5y ago
    a) I was on mobile, so no hover unfortunately b) i got confused by the first link which is about Sidenotes, but itself is not a sidenote :)
    • gwern 5y ago
      The Instant.page JS will still prefetch on mobile, it'll just do so on mouse-down instead of waiting ~1s of hover. Not as useful, presumably, but it would be hard to do better (how does one know before the finger touches the screen?) and still is shaving milliseconds.
• 0des 5y ago
  Remote island here, please don't do this. My pigeon can only carry so much and he's talking about retirement soon.