11–20 of 59 posts
Hope it doesn't come to email, for me I don't load remote content but not sure how to play in tracking over there.
This is a clever trick (using mousedown to trigger a click), but breaks drag & dropping links, drag & dropping links to new tabs. and there is also a thing I tend to do: If I notice I pressed the mouse button down on the wrong link, I move the cursor away from that link and let the button go up on the correct or in free space, so the browser doesn't navigate (not sure how common this behaviour is, though)
Didn’t think of drag and dropping links to new tabs! Yeah, that’s a bit of a sad regression. The two other use cases you mention aren’t common at all though.
This breaks the standard GUI interaction model. Buttons are typically triggered on mouse-up events, not mouse-down, and there's probably good reasons for that.
Any client-side hacks that attempt to improve the perceived page speed are somehow bound to break something. If there really is a simple way, it's already been implemented at the browser level, for all websites. Link prefetching is already a thing. Do you want fast pages? Make your server-side rendering fast.
Don't browsers do this themselves? Preload links on a page you visit? I think firefox calls it pre-fetching.
Don't browsers do this themselves? Preload links on a page you visit? I think firefox calls it pre-fetching.
What you might mean is "prerendering", i.e. silently downloading another page in the background. This feature is not yet supported in Firefox, but heavily used by Google and in Chrome. IIRC, earlier Firefox versions actually supported this through addons, but these addons did not know the page and pre-loaded every link they could find on the page. This resulted in an enormous amount of background traffic, essentially wasted due to only one link being the "next" link. Therefore, using the preload/prefetch/prerender link attributes should be left to the site owner.
Here's a good resource on preload (same page), prefetch (next page) and preconnect (other source domains): https://www.machmetrics.com/speed-blog/guide-to-browser-hint...
Edit: as Arkanosis mentioned in a related comment, the refered to addon was called Fasterfox: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/faq.html#What_is_prefetching
Don't browsers do this themselves? Preload links on a page you visit? I think firefox calls it pre-fetching.
I don't believe so, no. Imagine how much potential wasted bandwidth that would be for someone on cell data
Don't browsers do this themselves? Preload links on a page you visit? I think firefox calls it pre-fetching.
There are some big brand names listed in the "Trusted By" section, but it's unclear to me where they use instant.page. I clicked a few of the links and was unable to find an instant.page script tag anywhere.
More recent additions to the fleet include: https://www.bmwusa.com/ https://css-tricks.com/ https://www.juul.com/
>it triggers the page load when the user starts pressing their mouse This breaks the standard GUI interaction model. Buttons are typically triggered on mouse-up events, not mouse-down, and there's probably good reasons for that. Any client-side hacks that attempt to improve the perceived page speed are somehow bound to break something. If there really is a simple way, it's already been implemented at the browser leve…
Yeah.. imagine being so thirsty for page load efficiency that you ignore all the bloat of JavaScript and poor server-side rendering but instead directly skip to breaking the standardized GUI/UX