Which images? The idea here is that you load one page. And perhaps you go to another, of maaaany choices, page later.
If I knew (somewhat confidently) which page you're going to go to next, I can prefetch them with various headers and stuff. But I don't know which page you're going to go to. On this page, for example, there are about 10 pages you could go to that has images. The mouse hover the only chance I get as a clue to know which page you might want to go to next.
Why not generate real=prefetch headers for those images? It’d start loading before the JavaScript has evaluated, allows CDNs to start streaming those files before the browser requests them, and allows the browser to decide not to load them if it’s on a restricted data plan or has image loading disabled.
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Which images? The idea here is that you load one page. And perhaps you go to another, of maaaany choices, page later.
If I knew (somewhat confidently) which page you're going to go to next, I can prefetch them with various headers and stuff. But I don't know which page you're going to go to. On this page, for example, there are about 10 pages you could go to that has images. The mouse hover the only chance I get as a clue to know which page you might want to go to next.
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Why not generate real=prefetch headers for those images? It’d start loading before the JavaScript has evaluated, allows CDNs to start streaming those files before the browser requests them, and allows the browser to decide not to load them if it’s on a restricted data plan or has image loading disabled.