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

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

#61

Post by lwansbrough »

anoncake wrote: post #53
gwern wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enabling it by default Internet-wide seems like it could be a bad idea for many reasons. If I go out of my way to enable it on my site, I am taking responsibility for the bandwidth and any side-effects of prefetching a link and understand what I am doing. But if it is simply enabled Internet-wide, isn't that bordering on a DDoS? What about poorly-coded websites/apps where GETS are not idempotent or have side-effects?…

> What about poorly-coded websites/apps where GETS are not idempotent or have side-effects? They're already broken, exposing that is a good thing.

Breaking the web is not a good thing. Regardless of how you think things should be done.

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

#62

Post by mygo »

js4ever wrote: post #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

If a GET request is all it takes for your analytics to be messed up, then your analytics are not reliable in this era of bots pinging everything.

You need to be emitting your analytics events from a rendered/executed page. Preferably with javascript, and a fallback resource link to a tracking url can work here.

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

#63

Post by rurcliped »

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which can't legally be considered in hiring decisions here). HR doesn't want to deal with complications from cases where we reject an applicant but there's a log entry showing a visit to, say, family.html from our company's IP address block. We'd prefer that prefetching isn't a default.

There's also log analysis to identify the set of web pages visited by each employee during work hours, and an attempt to programmatically estimate the amount of non-work-related web browsing. This feeds into decisions about promotions/termination/etc. Prefetching won't get anyone automatically fired, but we'd still prefer it isn't a default.

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

#64

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

jolmg wrote: post #50
ams6110 wrote: 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…

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

I would bet 99%+ of web users do not have a sufficiently detailed mental model of web pages that this is something they've decided one way or the other.

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

#65

Post by arendtio »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #55
chrisseaton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's nothing stopping GET requests from having side effects. It's like pointing to a list of best practices and saying "everyone surely follows these." For example, someone changed their signature to `[img]/logout.php[/img]` on a forum I posted on as a kid and caused chaos. The mods couldn't remove it because, on the page that lets you modify a user's signature, it shows a signature preview. Good times.

I think it was a joke as GET requests are not supposed to change anything, but often they do (probably because many devs don't know about, understand or respect the RESTful concept).

EDIT: For completeness, I have to add, that I am also part of the group of people who have violated that concept. Maybe neither frequently nor recently, but I did it too :-/

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

#66

Post by hombre_fatal »

rurcliped wrote: post #63

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which…

Jesus. I hope they pay you well for that.

I've heard a lot of stories of ridiculous rule-by-HR culture, but that's so extreme it sounds made up.

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

#67

Post by thatcat »

rurcliped wrote: post #63

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which…

If you need people to design their websites around your companies HR metrics collection for them to work, then your HR department's metrics are the problem. The easiest way to improve productivity at your company could be to drastically cut HR funding, maybe HR should collect some metrics on how much time HR spends building datasets that aren't accurate.

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

#68

Post by veilrap »

rurcliped wrote: post #63

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which…

That sounds like hell.

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

#69

Post by bdcravens »

rurcliped wrote: post #63

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which…

Any companies with such onerous policies could block sites like instant.page at the firewall.

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

#70

Post by MrStonedOne »

benologist wrote: post #28

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.

No!

You should NEVER load javascript over https on a page that was served over http.

It gives a false sense of security that doesn't exist.

Because the source page was served over http, the source page can be modified by an attacker, making the script be loaded under ssl makes you think its protected. But its not since an attacker could just modify the script tag to remove the https bit in transit then modify the script thats now being loaded over http.

In sort, forcing the script to use https gives you no gain when the page that includes it is served over http and it tricks you into thinking that javascript asset is secure.

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