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If comments are a problem you can use a display:none textarea or a dozen other things. The important bit is that steve has found another way to decouple the HTTP loading from the Javascript engine parsing/loading. That's a fairly significant result.

If something goes wrong it's probably fixable / avoidable. This kind of extreme tuning may not for everyone but a 100msec saved is a happier user.

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I was just wondering, why can't you start an async xmlhttprequest at the onload event? It won't start the parsing until you tell it to, it won't block the loading of the UI and it's not as obscure as using eval on comments.

In very high latency situations new connections are too expensive. Say you have 300msecs packet latency, which is common in mobile. That means in worst case, that XHR will take at least one second just to the DNS lookup and establish the TCP connection to start downloading the file.

It's not the volts, it's the amps that kill you. So to speak.

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