On 09/02/14 06:13, Kudu wrote:
Hi,
Today, I heard about a JavaScript library called InstantClick (http://instantclick.io/). Basically, it's based on the principle that latency is responsible for a lot of the Web's slowness. It also considers that there are about 250ms between hovering over and clicking on a link. Therefore, it starts pre-loading the page on hover, and then switches to it via AJAX when the user clicks the link. It can also do this on mousedown only, which causes no additional server load and still provides a performance boost, according to its website, similarly to Rails' turbolinks functionality.
Is there any chance this could work on MediaWiki?
I think Google Web Accelerator used to do this. Interesting to see old ideas become new again.
function mouseout() { ... p.xhr.abort() ... }
A scary concept, considering the way our system handles client-side aborts. After a configurable delay, recommended to be 50-100ms, the XHR request starts, then it is aborted if the cursor moves out of the link. Moving the cursor through a dense list of links to large pages, like say a talk page archive list, could be quite expensive for the server.
Maybe if there was a limit on the number of prefetch requests per page view, it would be less scary. And potentially less expensive for roaming mobile users.
-- Tim Starling