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?
Regards, -Kudu.
This is pretty neat. Some a/b tests on mobile would help us understand just how much extra data this would cause people to consume vs. how much time it saves them.
On desktop, I bet a combination of this with something like cursor proximity based events [1] would be interesting to look into.
[1] https://github.com/padolsey/jquery.fn/tree/master/proximity-event