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Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

instant.page

41–50 of 361 posts

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#41

Perhaps this something that a browser should be doing, instead of websites themselves?

The heuristics to exclude logout links and the like would be very disruptive. Those decisions need to be in the website author's hands. However, I think if browsers had this, but off by default until seeing tags to enable it along with any exclusions, that would be great.

I think it would only prefetch GET links, which never have side effects.

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#42

Embedding via // without explicit SSL should probably be considered harmful or malicious as there is no reason to make such scripts available without SSL. Even if the end website is not using SSL users can still fetch your script securely.

The example snippet uses SRI [1], so there's no security issue with plain HTTP. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

It's not supported by IE.

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#44
post #10
post #5

This is a feature available on most web frameworks today (for example Link's prefetch on Next.js), but still could be very useful for smaller website and other static pages not using such frameworks. I'd be a little wary of using a script from an unknown person without being able to look at the code - I'd rather see this open source before using. Especially being free and MIT licensed, I don't see why it wouldn't be…

In the technical details, he has a link to the open source on github. Here's the js that's actually doing the preloading: https://github.com/instantpage/instant.page/blob/master/inst...

I stand corrected then, thanks for sharing :) I missed that part!

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#45
Each time you hover over a link it's doing a GET request bypassing the cache (cache-control: max-age), even if you hove the same multiple times. Also this will make all your analytics false... Except that indeed this can improve greatly the user sensation of speed

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#46
post #36

Not sure how I feel about this. I often hover over a link to see where it is linking to, see if it has a title, etc. But that's probably not typical of most users. And I don't do it on sites I use often and am familiar with.

There's usually no penalty, though. You hover, and the page preload begins. Unless you're trying to keep your data usage to a minimum, there's no disadvantage to you.

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no security gain from going to HTTPS if the site is served over HTTP, but there’s a small speed hit.

The communication between the user and example.com downloading the page referring to your script is secured by their SSL if they have it. Separately to that, the communication between the user and your server when downloading your script is secured by your SSL. This can be secure even if example.com is not, so it should only be secure.

If the first html load isn't on SSL, and someone is able to intercept your traffic, they can change the embedded https url to be a non-https url anyway, so I can't even imagine the attack that is prevented by using https into something loaded over http.

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#49
post #26
post #5

This is a feature available on most web frameworks today (for example Link's prefetch on Next.js), but still could be very useful for smaller website and other static pages not using such frameworks. I'd be a little wary of using a script from an unknown person without being able to look at the code - I'd rather see this open source before using. Especially being free and MIT licensed, I don't see why it wouldn't be…

Is there something similar available on Django?

This should be completely backend agnostic. I was never a Django person, but you’d just put that script tag in your main template so it loads on every page.

Re: Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

#50
post #36

Not sure how I feel about this. I often hover over a link to see where it is linking to, see if it has a title, etc. But that's probably not typical of most users. And I don't do it on sites I use often and am familiar with.

I feel this fails a user expectation that simply hovering over a link doesn't inform the server of anything.

It's curious you mention checking where links link to, because I think that's also another user expectation failure. The url that appears in the status bar below (or what was once a status bar) is not necessarily the link's true destination. You can go to any google search results page, hover over the links in the results and compare with the href attributes in the tags. They're different. It looks like you'd be going directly to the page that's on the URL, but you're actually first going to google and google redirects you to the URL you saw.

It used to be that checking the url in the status bar allowed you to make sure the link really would take you to where the text made you think it would take you, but that's no longer the case. It seems one can easily make a link that seems like it would take you to your bank and then take you to a phished page.

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