It is a nice idea, but I am not sure about the benefits. Many times I hover over a link to see if it is suspicious, preloading that one would be a bad plan (even if it is only the HTML). Clicking a link is a conscious decision - I want to go there. I should not load lots of content in the background that I might want if for example I scroll with two fingers. This very much annoyed me at Facebook lately - playing videos just when your mouse hovered them which made scrolling very slow indeed.
It is a nice idea but I think our efforts are spent more wisely in making the overall load of a page smaller and quicker rather than prefetching. Replacing a "I spy on your users" like button with a simple link pointing to that social services's REST API for example saves a lot of bytes.
But loading videos has a significant effect that some percentage of people don't like. I can't imagine many people NOT liking faster loading times.
To be honest, I'm not 101% convinced about this hack myself. That's why I'm using my personal blog as an experimental ground. Let's see how it feels as it's brewing.
Comment
It is a nice idea, but I am not sure about the benefits. Many times I hover over a link to see if it is suspicious, preloading that one would be a bad plan (even if it is only the HTML). Clicking a link is a conscious decision - I want to go there. I should not load lots of content in the background that I might want if for example I scroll with two fingers. This very much annoyed me at Facebook lately - playing videos just when your mouse hovered them which made scrolling very slow indeed.
It is a nice idea but I think our efforts are spent more wisely in making the overall load of a page smaller and quicker rather than prefetching. Replacing a "I spy on your users" like button with a simple link pointing to that social services's REST API for example saves a lot of bytes.
Replies
But loading videos has a significant effect that some percentage of people don't like. I can't imagine many people NOT liking faster loading times.
To be honest, I'm not 101% convinced about this hack myself. That's why I'm using my personal blog as an experimental ground. Let's see how it feels as it's brewing.