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Comment by Garbage | Hacker News Reader

Nice work Mozilla.

Sometimes I wonder why we give so much importance for 1-2 second page load / javascript improvements. Does average user really care about 1-2 second difference?

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Yes. Two seconds is usually regarded as the rection time threshold where an ineractive system starts to turn into a batch system. It is long enough for the user to start to forget what he expects from the system or to think about swiching to another activity while the current one loads. That is also the reason why database transaction benchmarks are always defined by number of transactions per second at a response time of slightly under two seconds, that is the threshold where they can still claim that the benchmark measures something about a system that is actually usable in practice.

So cutting response times by a second from say two seconds to one second changes the percieved delays from barely tolereble to barely noticable, which is unually beneficial for interactive apps.

My GOD yes. 400 milliseconds is big. 1000-2000 milliseconds is huge. Details from Google and Bing (via the ever-awesome Brady Forrest):

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/bing-and-google-agree-slow-...

Yes, certainly they do. Amazon even did that famous internal study showing that, other factors being equal, a page that loaded 200ms more slowly caused a statistically significant drop in revenue. (Even if end users aren't aware that they care, they care.)

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