Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute

instant.page

1,214 pointsdieulot337 comments

Live demo on my website @ https://sysadmincasts.com/

Temporary added it in-line for testing. I was already in the sub 100ms level but this just puts it over the top! Also updated all admin add/edit/delete/toggle/logout links with "data-no-instant". Pretty easy. Open developer preview and watch the network tab. Pretty neat to watch it prefetch! Thanks for creating this!

ps. Working on adding the license comment. I strip comments at the template parse level (working on that now).

pps. I was using https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to debug page speed before. Then working down the list of its suggestions. Scoring 98/100 on mobile and 100/100 on desktop. I ended up inlining some css, most images are converted to base64 and inlined (no extra http calls), heavy cache of db results on the backend, wrote the CMS in Go, using a CDN (with content cache), all to get to sub 100ms page loads. Pretty hilarious when you think about it but it works pretty well.

If I mouse-over the same link 10 times, it looks in my network tab like it downloads the link 10 times.

I'd expect this preload script to remember the pages it's already fetched and not duplicate work unnecessarily. :/

Perhaps the author could add a script parameter, or support an optional 'preload-cache-for' attribute, so you'd write <a preload-cache-for="300s" ...>

If you really care about speed anyway, you should already have setup your site to max out caching opportunities (Etag, Last-modified, and replying "not-modified" to "if-modified-since" queries) - I'd suggest the author should ensure the script does support caching to the broadest extent possible - hitting your site whenever appropriate.

Cache-Control headers already do a better job of solving that problem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

Set your http cache headers correctly to instruct the client to save and re-use pages it downloads.

Yeah, this is likely something I need to look into. Since the site changes quite a bit for, non-logged vs logged, I'm not really doing much html caching right now. I'll check that out though. Even if I added something like 30 second cache TTL that might work. I'd have to see if that is even possible and test though. Maybe force an update on login? I'm not a html cache pro so I'd need to see what the options are and then do some testing. For now, it was just fast enough / not worth the time, to do anything other than a fresh page for each request. But, this is a good suggestion. Thanks.

ps. I do tons of caching for any images and videos though. I know those things never change so have weeks of caching enabled.

But how do you know it's still fresh?

HTTP has multiple cache control headers. It's a fairly complex topic, but TL;DR: do the config and it works in any browser since ~2000 (yes, even IE6).

Very impressive! Wonder if it'd be worth rerouting some of the paginated URLs like the episodes `?page=4` to `/page-4` or something like that. :shrug: - either way, looks like you had some fun optimizing it!

/page/4 would probably be more prudent

I don't like this as much since a savvy user might then try to navigate to /pages/ - which has what on it?

Good idea. I'll check that out! Thanks.

I just released version 1.1.0 which allows whitelisting specific links with query strings like those. https://instant.page/blacklist

Awesome, thank you!

This is what the OP should have posted. Very impressive. Will use in my work.

I like that there's an extra optimization where it cancels the preload if your cursor leaves and the prefetch hasn't finished it. Would help on really slow networks and pages that timeout.

nothing on my network tab in ff 65.0

ditto. It works on Chrome though (sigh)

Why the sigh? It says right on the site that this gracefully degrades on browsers that don’t support it. Why is it a problem making a site faster in a browser designed for speed, if it does not degrade the experience at all in all other browsers?

That is OK, if you are talking about older browsers or browsers on limited / obscure platforms. Firefox doesn't fit the bill, and optimizing the site just for ~~IE~~ Chrome hurts the FF users and makes Chrome win even more - leading to self-fulfilling claim that Chrome is faster. It's not, but it will be if people optimize for it. This is one of the reasons I make a point to always develop in Firefox and later just check in Chrome (note that I still do check, because majority of people use it) - apart from simply better experience of course. :)

Not working for me either, Chrome works great though.

Embedding base64 images isn't really more efficient on HTTP/2 servers. Base64 adds overhead, and multiplexing mitigates the cost of additional network requests.

But unless you use server push, it still is an additional roundtrip.

Yes but since it's multiplexed into the same tcp stream it doesn't suffer from slow start and so the tcp window is already large so it's not as bad as it would be on http1.

UPDATE - Feb 11. I removed the include for now. I was seeing a weird caching issue when people login/logout where the navbar would not update correctly (for the first few requests after). I'm still digging into this. I likely need to invalidate the browser cache some how. Doing some research to see what the options are.

Have you signed up for a page speed monitoring service, like https://speedmonitor.io/ ?

I'd be very curious to know what your performance looks like over time, especially as it relates to various improvements that you try out.

Or maybe Pingdom, NewRelic, or gtmetrix?

I wonder if breaking the page into two parts as above and below the fold, Above would even have base64 images and all inlined, below would get analytics script loaded.

I've been testing it for the past 30 minutes or so and found that it doesn't cause the same problems that InstantClick did. (Which was javascript errors that would randomly occur.) I'll limit it to a small subset of users to see if any errors are reported but there is a good chance this could go live for all logged in users. Maybe even all website visitors if all goes well.

Seems to have no impact on any javascript, including ads. Pages do load faster, and I can see the prefetch working.

Just make sure you apply the data-no-instant tag to your logout link, otherwise it'll logout on mouseover.

> Just make sure you apply the data-no-instant tag to your logout link, otherwise it'll logout on mouseover.

Logout links should never be GETs in the first place - they change states and should be POSTs.

POSTs are not Links. And Logout service is indempotent even if you can consider it changes the state of the system

Lots of people in this thread confusing “idempotent” with “safe” as specified in the HTTP RFC: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

Ok, so make it a form/button styled to look like a link.

Idempotency is not the issue, the issue is that a user might hover over the logout link, not click it, then move on to the rest of the site and find they are logged out for no reason.

Thanks, how did you find out about data-no-instant tag?

https://instant.page/blacklist

Each time you hover over a link it's doing a GET request bypassing the cache (cache-control: max-age), even if you hove the same multiple times. Also this will make all your analytics false... Except that indeed this can improve greatly the user sensation of speed

The analytics should only be triggered is the page is rendered, assuming it's done client side. I believe Google does this for first top 3 results if I'm not mistaken.

This helped me quite a bit, my mental model of how this worked was off. Prefetching only downloads the resources but does not actually execute any js code. So sites doing lots of tag managers or other js loading js likely wouldn't benefit, but standard GA, etc. should be fine.

Added bonus: these extra pre-loads on hover will tell you if someone nearly clicked a link. Your web server logs contain some poor-man's eye tracking. Could aid determining if important parts of your pages (warning messages and so forth) gather enough attention.

Seems like an invasion of privacy. I'd be surprised if someone hadn't used this sort of script for this already. Perhaps browsers or ad blockers will block this feature in the future.

There's already other libraries out there like Fullstory, which tracks all the user mouse movements and interactions with the page and allows you to watch a user interact with your site in nearly realtime.

There are full tracking tools that do a lot more than this already - tracking all mouse movements and key presses. They are often used with the knowledge of users when testing UI changes/experiments, I've even heard of more general versions running as a browser plug-in for medical monitoring (watching for changes in coordination of people with degenerative conditions, without it feeling like an active test accidentally biasing results), though I would also be surprised not to find the idea already used more widely (and perhaps more nefariously) without users knowing.

Good point.

What would be a good way to avoid prefetch requests in your analytics if you only derive analytics from server access logs?

Most browsers pass a "purpose:prefetch" or similar HTTP header in the prefetch request that you can use to differentiate

Then how do you know when they actually go to the page? Do you need client side analytics at that point since the browser already has the page in memory?

You could obviously do it with JavaScript by pinging the server to tell him that log entry X is to be promoted to a true "hit".

For a non-JS solution, I guess an tiny iframe at the bottom of the html page that accesses a special server page with an unique stamp that causes the same "hit". the iframe loading would mean that the rest of the page is mostly loaded before it was closed.

> For a non-JS solution

How do you use this library with JS disabled?

If a GET request is all it takes for your analytics to be messed up, then your analytics are not reliable in this era of bots pinging everything.

You need to be emitting your analytics events from a rendered/executed page. Preferably with javascript, and a fallback <noscript> resource link to a tracking url can work here.

What's more important - analytics, or the user experience. Damaging stats sucks, but this seems to outweigh that.

Clearly you're not in middle management.

In a lot of legit cases, analytics. Especially versus a UX improvement that is clearly minor. The word "analytics" has bad rep but it's massively important to know if you're building the right product for your users, without a sort of analytics you're shooting in the dark

Without analytics, I don't justify my project soooo

Might be worth adding something like a Pre-Fetch: True header to pre-fetched requests. But then the problem is, if the user pre-fetches and then actually views it, how does your analytics know unless the client then sends another request?

So would setting erroneous pre fetch headers to all requests would help to spoil analytics insights?

It seems everybody is missing this but this could actually slow down your experience, and I'd actually guess it will in some scenarios (ie. not only a theoretical situation).

Considering a user hovering over a bunch of links and then clicking the last one, and doing this in a second. Let's assume your site takes 3 sec to load (full round-trip) and you're server is only handling one request at a time (I'm not sure how often this is the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case within sessions for a significant amount of cases). Then the link the user clicked would actually be loaded last, after all the others - this probably drastically increase loading time.

The weak spot in this reasoning is the assumption that you're server won't handle these requests in parallel. Unfortunately I'm not experienced enough to know whether that happens or not, but if so, you should probably be careful and not think that the additional server load is the only downside (which part like is a negligible downside).

It actually cancels the previous request when you hover over another link

Client side canceled doesn’t necessarily translate to server side canceled.

I used to use a preload-on-hover trick like this but decided to remove it once we started getting a lot of traffic. I was afraid I’d overload the server.

I'd also hesitate wasting resources in such a way.

About your first statement though, which server software do you use that still sends data after the client has closed the connection? Doesn't it use hearbeats based on ACKs?

It doesn’t send the response to the client, but it still does all the work of generating the response.

I use nginx to proxy_pass to django+gunicorn via unix socket. I sometimes see 499 code responses in my nginx logs which I believe means that nginx received a response from the backend, but can’t send it to the client because the client canceled the request.

I admit I haven’t actually tested it directly, but I’ve always assumed the django request/response cycle doesn’t get aborted mid request.

The server is still doing all of the work in its request handlers regardless of whether client closed the connection.

I believe PHPFPM behaves in this way. When the client disconnects from the web server, their request stays in the queue for a worker to pick up, I don’t believe there is a way to cancel it.

Per my cursory reading of the source code it looks like it might only prefetch one link at a time: https://github.com/instantpage/instant.page/blob/master/inst...

If that's not how it works, it could easily be modified to add a throttle on how many links it will prefetch simultaneously.

This library should be only handling cache logistics, moving a cdn cache to browser. Otherwise is ill advised because of the reasons specified.

Every site that can use a last mile performance optimization like this should already be serving everything from some form of cache, either from varnish or a cdn. So in theory, availability of the content should not be the problem.

It also has a minimum time of hovering, so if you're going by it quickly it won't fetch anything.

Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a job with my team may include a link to a web page about their job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's marital status (which can't legally be considered in hiring decisions here). HR doesn't want to deal with complications from cases where we reject an applicant but there's a log entry showing a visit to, say, family.html from our company's IP address block. We'd prefer that prefetching isn't a default.

There's also log analysis to identify the set of web pages visited by each employee during work hours, and an attempt to programmatically estimate the amount of non-work-related web browsing. This feeds into decisions about promotions/termination/etc. Prefetching won't get anyone automatically fired, but we'd still prefer it isn't a default.

If you need people to design their websites around your companies HR metrics collection for them to work, then your HR department's metrics are the problem. The easiest way to improve productivity at your company could be to drastically cut HR funding, maybe HR should collect some metrics on how much time HR spends building datasets that aren't accurate.

I don't think it's a matter of HR necessarily. HR has guidelines because a lot of their job has to do with compliance. Big companies absolutely need large HR departments because a lot more regulations apply.

Which regulation states that promotions should be based on browser history?

While this is an approach you could take, it's not a very user friendly one. I agree with you that those HR policies sound draconian, but OP isn't necessarily in a position to challenge or change them.

In addition to being less user friendly, having the mindset that users/visitors to your website must live and work in ideal settings means that whatever you create will tend to be fragile and brittle because you don't try to take into account situations that you haven't seen before.

Jesus. I hope they pay you well for that.

I've heard a lot of stories of ridiculous rule-by-HR culture, but that's so extreme it sounds made up.

I don't think it's made up, because I experienced the same thing in a pretty well-known European research center...

Of course, had I known about these practices in advance, I would have declined the job offer. But I didn't. I ended up quitting a few weeks later anyway.

IT would monitor all connections from all employees and send a report to upper management with summary statistics, on a monthly basis.

I was told this was the case by a fellow worker during my second day there, so I tunneled my traffic through my home server via SSH. When IT asked me why I had zero HTTP requests, I reminded them that monitoring employees traffic was illegal under our current legislation. Doing this in a university-like non-profit research center is hard to justify.

The part about viewing family.html seems kind of understandable. If you assume no bad actors, then it's crazy... But we're all developers here, we know that you have to assume the existence of bad actors, and assume that they are going to target you (which is why we you always validate data client data server-side). I could see how viewing family.html could turn into a real headache for HR/Legal, especially if the law says that you can't discriminate based on family information.

The other part about log analysis seems crazy, though, I agree with you on that.

One of my biggest career goals is never to work in a company like that. A company that micromanages me to the point they search my fucking internet history to decide my termination doesn't deserve my technical skills.

Double True!

The second hn item today that made me agree that developers need a union.

I always let my team browse Facebook, if they wanted. One of my top people browsed it the most out of everyone. If you block a page, then they will just use their phone.

If you are going to measure, then measure outputs. Measuring inputs will make you and your team equally unhappy.

Measuring Output! Especially true for which their job require more thinking than actual labour. It doesn't matter how much time he spent on it, as long as it gets done. And more often, you actually need to play a game, relax or something different before coming back and solve the problem in seconds as compare to staring at it for hours and not getting anywhere.

Sounds terrible: An automated analysis of an employee's behaviour linked to promotions and even terminations? Should be outright illegal.

The webbrowsing of other people is their private matter. If you think someone is surfing the web too much (or taking too many coffee breaks, or leaning on the shovel for a minute or any other normal activity people do to take little breaks from work), it's on leadership to tell the person to get back to work, or generally, create a work environment where work flows more naturally.

Logs are for investigations in case of crimes etc.

I read so many things here on HN that are illegal in Germany. We have laws and powerful worker representation that prevents dehumanitzing stuff like that but, often, things started in the US find their way over here....

> There's also log analysis to identify the set of web pages visited by each employee during work hours, and an attempt to programmatically estimate the amount of non-work-related web browsing.

If your company is doing that, then do not browse on company time and/or using company equipment at all. Ever. They obviously don't (or for regulatory reasons, can't) trust you, so you should treat them as an adversary for your own good.

Remember: HR exists to protect the company, not the employees.

Any companies with such onerous policies could block sites like instant.page at the firewall.

Why would they block being handed extra leverage over their employees?

I had seen that kind of firewall before when a sale presented what his firewall is capable of at company I worked with. I'm not sure how I felt back then.

I mean that firewall was used to track every website you browse and other evil stuff.

>This feeds into decisions about promotions/termination/etc.

Where do you work that makes tolerating that level of idiotic behavior worth it? It the job super interesting or the pay above market rate? If not, there are much greener pastures my friend.

Companies that treat their employees like morons eventually push out everyone who is not one.

That sounds like hell.

That story about 'personal' pages sounds like an excuse for tracking what you do on your computer. I'd look for a different job if I were you to be honest. It sounds like a toxic environment to work in.

> Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages may be accessed.

I think only very few people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what types of pages can be fetched. As a web developer, if I can make a faster experience for 99% of my population at the cost of potentially annoying the HR department of some tiny fraction of them, I'm going to do it. And I won't feel bad about making it slightly more difficult for my site's visitors' management to effectively surveil their browsing habits -- not my problem!

Could you say what company this is, so that I can make sure I never work there?

You can surf with JavaScript turned off, or use your private mobile phone.

You should find a different company to work for.

Just wondering, which continent are you located in?

Does your company tell its' employees about their Orwellian policies upfront when hiring, or is it a public secret?

How do you deal with encrypted traffic, e.g. https?

Some companies simply filter web traffic via corporate white/blacklists, maybe you have some insights why an illusion of freedom has been chosen in your company?

Sounds like prefetching is good for you, since greater prefetching provides greater plausible deniability.

Tbh I would have been fired the next day.

P.S: Using HN at my office. Was looking at career pages of other software companies a while ago.

I hope I never end up in your dystopian part of the world.

Is there a novel about this company?

Is this a re-rebranding? I remember using something similar 4-5 years ago (instant.js/instantclick).

But quite an interesting little thing, especially useful for older websites to bring some life into them. The effect is very noticeable.

Kind of. It’s different than InstantClick in that it uses <link rel="prefetch"> and can thus be embedded in one minute, while InstantClick transforms a site into an SPA and require additional work.

It’s a different product. The initially planned name for it was “InstantClick Lite”.

Oh interesting, I'll give this a go.

I've seen this kind of features several times on libs. And sometimes I can't un-think about it while my mouse is hovering on links in normal life. It's .. prefetching or not?

Hmm, I wonder: if the user isn't asked to authorise the action whether it technically breaches the Computer Misuse Act (UK).

If you send a requested page, that's obviously fine. Normal use of websites is expected, but unilaterally instructing your site visitor's browser to download further unrequested content that's not part of a requested resource ...?

What about downloading tracking js you didn't ask for then?

Since nothing is actually executed until you click on the link, the only issue would be those on metered connections.

This is a feature available on most web frameworks today (for example Link's prefetch on Next.js), but still could be very useful for smaller website and other static pages not using such frameworks.

I'd be a little wary of using a script from an unknown person without being able to look at the code - I'd rather see this open source before using. Especially being free and MIT licensed, I don't see why it wouldn't be open.

In the technical details, he has a link to the open source on github. Here's the js that's actually doing the preloading: https://github.com/instantpage/instant.page/blob/master/inst...

I stand corrected then, thanks for sharing :) I missed that part!

Just go directly to the script url: https://instant.page/1.0.0

The code is not obfuscated or minified, very easy to read.

It probably should be minified if the whole point is to improve page load times.

Compression and caching makes any minification of small scripts more than negligible.

Perhaps you meant less than negligible? Or simply negligible? But not more.

It appears that the source code [1] is linked from their Technical Details page.

[1] https://github.com/instantpage/instant.page

Isn't everything client-side on the web inherently open-source?

Is there something similar available on Django?

This should be completely backend agnostic. I was never a Django person, but you’d just put that script tag in your main template so it loads on every page.

I use Django and have done similar things. yes this should be backend agnostic.

Perhaps this something that a browser should be doing, instead of websites themselves?

Enabling it by default Internet-wide seems like it could be a bad idea for many reasons. If I go out of my way to enable it on my site, I am taking responsibility for the bandwidth and any side-effects of prefetching a link and understand what I am doing. But if it is simply enabled Internet-wide, isn't that bordering on a DDoS? What about poorly-coded websites/apps where GETS are not idempotent or have side-effects? What about server-side analytics/logs tracking HTML downloads?

> What about poorly-coded websites/apps where GETS are not idempotent or have side-effects?

They're already broken, exposing that is a good thing.

Breaking the web is not a good thing. Regardless of how you think things should be done.

Indeed, breaking the web by misusing GET is not a good thing. By extension, keeping the web broken by not exposing this breakage is not a good thing either.

Vulnerable isn't broken

The heuristics to exclude logout links and the like would be very disruptive. Those decisions need to be in the website author's hands.

However, I think if browsers had this, but off by default until seeing tags to enable it along with any exclusions, that would be great.

I think it would only prefetch GET links, which never have side effects.

There's nothing stopping GET requests from having side effects.

It's like pointing to a list of best practices and saying "everyone surely follows these."

For example, someone changed their signature to `[img]/logout.php[/img]` on a forum I posted on as a kid and caused chaos. The mods couldn't remove it because, on the page that lets you modify a user's signature, it shows a signature preview. Good times.

I think it was a joke as GET requests are not supposed to change anything, but often they do (probably because many devs don't know about, understand or respect the RESTful concept).

EDIT: For completeness, I have to add, that I am also part of the group of people who have violated that concept. Maybe neither frequently nor recently, but I did it too :-/

> There's nothing stopping GET requests from having side effects.

> It's like pointing to a list of best practices and saying "everyone surely follows these."

It’s not a ‘best practice’ it’s literally the spec for the web.

You're typing this comment on a site that has a GET link to logout.

This phrase "GET link" I keep seeing makes sense, but strikes me as odd. Is that to differentiate from an "a" tag that triggers JS that makes a fetch/xhr with another method? The only non-JS non-GET request I'm aware of is a form action (POST by default, GET if specified) which can hardly be called a link, unless I'm wrong to equate link with "a" tag.

It could be a way for browsers to encourage GET to be used more correctly.

Seems like you'd be punishing users instead of website operators since the cause/effect relationship is so unobvious.

User happens to brush over the logout button while using the site. On their next click, they're logged out. Weird. Guess I'll just log in again. Doesn't happen again for some time, but then it does. Weird, didn't that happen the other week? What's wrong with my browser? Oh cool, switching browsers fixed it. You're having that issue, too? Don't worry, I figured it out. Just switch browsers.

It doesn't have to be. Could start by allowing website authors to opt in via a tag in the <head> or something, then opt out on a per-link basis with an attribute (eg preload=false)

I remember using some web accelerator 15-20 years ago. Prefetching all links on webpages. It was really helpful on modem/ISDN connection.

Standalone program on Windows XP (or maybe Windows 98?). It had it's own window where you could see which pages it was loading.

Does anyone know the name?

It's funny how much more sense this made on old-fashioned dial-up connections. Back then, as far as I remember, there was no data limit as such. The only thing that counted was connection time. Rather than sitting there reading something while generating ticks, you could better download much of the site and disconnect. An old form of rush to idle.

Doing it by default seems a bit invasive, but I'd be interested in this as a configurable option or plugin!

Embedding via // without explicit SSL should probably be considered harmful or malicious as there is no reason to make such scripts available without SSL. Even if the end website is not using SSL users can still fetch your script securely.

The example snippet uses SRI [1], so there's no security issue with plain HTTP.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

It's not supported by IE.

IE doesn't support script type "module" anyway, so it'll ignore the script tag: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/sc...

There’s no security gain from going to HTTPS if the site is served over HTTP, but there’s a small speed hit.

The communication between the user and example.com downloading the page referring to your script is secured by their SSL if they have it.

Separately to that, the communication between the user and your server when downloading your script is secured by your SSL. This can be secure even if example.com is not, so it should only be secure.

If the first html load isn't on SSL, and someone is able to intercept your traffic, they can change the embedded https url to be a non-https url anyway, so I can't even imagine the attack that is prevented by using https into something loaded over http.

No site should be served over plain HTTP in 2019. Browsers and search engines are actively discouraging/downranking websites that don't use TLS at this point.

None should be, but several are. Just the way that it is.

By the way, since .page is HSTS-preloaded, you may as well include https:// in the code snippet that includes the library. It'll avoid the http-to-https link rewriting internal redirect from happening when included from a non-secure site. It's a tiny performance improvement, but across millions of page views, it might add up.

If the browser sends a Referer header, the page the user is currently on will be sent over plaintext.

For exactly this reason browsers don’t send a Referer header when an HTTP request is made from an HTTPS page. (Nor for any kind of request made from a local file.)

No!

You should NEVER load javascript over https on a page that was served over http.

It gives a false sense of security that doesn't exist.

Because the source page was served over http, the source page can be modified by an attacker, making the script be loaded under ssl makes you think its protected. But its not since an attacker could just modify the script tag to remove the https bit in transit then modify the script thats now being loaded over http.

In sort, forcing the script to use https gives you no gain when the page that includes it is served over http and it tricks you into thinking that javascript asset is secure.

Who does this affect? The attacker can always modify the page however they want anyways and the https for the js source would mean the js itself cannot be tampered with

Does it help much? No. Should you use it? Yes.

Who is being tricked? I don't suspect the user is checking the script tags to see if they are secure. At the very least, this might stop basic ISP tampering used to inject bandwidth warnings, etc.

The programmer that put the script tag in there.

Or just stop using HTTP like a normal person. Who still has pages served over anything hit HTTPS?

     Who still has pages served over anything hit HTTPS?

Someone who wants to explore our emerging financial liability as we grow increasingly compelled by law to actively protect data in transit (that's SSL), at rest, and in distribution.

     Penalties for violations can be huge, as much as 20 
     million euros or 4% of the company's annual turnover.

https://blog.quttera.com/post/gdpr-and-website-security/

No browsers present that to users as a secure context, so nobody is being tricked.

More HTTPS == Better. If you can load this over HTTPS you should, no matter what circumstance. The browsers iconography will handle notifying people when the context is secure or not.

FYI, the entire .page TLD is HSTS-preloaded. So in HSTS-preload compliant browsers, this will be rewritten as an https URL prior to fetching it even if included on an http page. In Chrome, you can use web inspector to see the link being rewritten using a 307 'Internal Redirect' prior to sending the request to instant.page.

Not sure how I feel about this. I often hover over a link to see where it is linking to, see if it has a title, etc. But that's probably not typical of most users. And I don't do it on sites I use often and am familiar with.

I feel this fails a user expectation that simply hovering over a link doesn't inform the server of anything.

It's curious you mention checking where links link to, because I think that's also another user expectation failure. The url that appears in the status bar below (or what was once a status bar) is not necessarily the link's true destination. You can go to any google search results page, hover over the links in the results and compare with the href attributes in the <a> tags. They're different. It looks like you'd be going directly to the page that's on the URL, but you're actually first going to google and google redirects you to the URL you saw.

It used to be that checking the url in the status bar allowed you to make sure the link really would take you to where the text made you think it would take you, but that's no longer the case. It seems one can easily make a link that seems like it would take you to your bank and then take you to a phished page.

> I feel this fails a user expectation that simply hovering over a link doesn't inform the server of anything.

I would bet 99%+ of web users do not have a sufficiently detailed mental model of web pages that this is something they've decided one way or the other.

Agreed, my expectations are the opposite.

Google Analytics et al, allow custom events which are used to record mouse overs, clicks, et cetera on a majority of websites. I always just assume everything I do, down to page scrolls and mouse movements, is recorded.

>I feel this fails a user expectation that simply hovering over a link doesn't inform the server of anything.

The validity of that expectation died with the advent of web analytics probably two decades ago now. The wholly general solution is to disable javascript, possibly re-enabling it on websites you trust. Sites that break without js are oftentimes not worth browsing anyway.

There's usually no penalty, though. You hover, and the page preload begins. Unless you're trying to keep your data usage to a minimum, there's no disadvantage to you.

And if it only preloads the HTML and not related files, it's still going to be minimal

Or prevent law enforcement, or other "overseers" from believing you visited a page.

I can see children getting punkd by drive-by prefetch and reporting to teaching staff that X visited a neo-nazi site or, Y downloaded porn during class, etc..

"Prefetch did it" is probably not going to be apparent to most, and is going to sound like a weaksauce excuse.

On the other hand if you're visiting pages that link to neo-nazi content or pornography just one link away from the page you're currently on, chances are the page you're currently on would violate whatever acceptable use policy you're supposed to be following.

Or you opened a random blog, Reddit, or did an innocuous search, or ...

I'm curious how this is better than Google quicklink (https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/quicklink) which is something I have active on my site currently. Can someone with more technical knowledge point out which of these two "instant pages" solutions is better?

Same preloading technique but quicklink preloads more agressively.

Why use this script as an include from the instant.page domain? I think if I'm going to use this I'm just going to serve this script up myself from my own servers.

Good call, I just switched my site to hosting the script itself.

Nice idea for HTTP/1.x, however, isn't this what HTTP/2.0 [1] is meant to achieve by pushing components at the user?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push

The main difference being that instant.page respects users' data allowances by prefetching only resources that it thinks the user intends to load. You could combine it with H2 push and/or prefetch response headers to improve the load times even more :)

It probably respects their data allowances even less, considering it completely re-fetches the page every time you hover over the link.

The difference between the HTTP/2.0 and instant.page is that the preload initiative is on the client, and not the server. I guess you could use both. HTTP/2.0 for linked resources and instant.page to preload based on the user's behavior.

Would you push everything? Or just hovered links?

In all honesty, personally I'd push all adjacent page content. HTML compresses very well, its minor compared to JS and page images. If the user proceeds to a pushed page, they'd just be waiting for the browser to do the render and collect images. It'd be a compromise, since most images are probably going to be standard page furniture, so likely cached already.

I also staged it on my blog and it's working awesome http://staging.ahmet.im/blog/index.html . I wonder if CMS tools or static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican etc) should have an option for rel="preload". But I guess it still requires some JS for preload on hover, so is this library going to take off now?

Great stuff, I started doing this in 2006 but manually. I made an unofficial google toolbar for Opera[1] that (in the unreleased final version lol) also loaded the images from the search pages when one hovered over the toolbar icons.

It took a lot of tweaking to give it the right feel. imho it shouldn't start fetching to fast in case the mouse is only moved over the link. Loading to many assets at the same time is also bad. Some should preload with a delay and hovering over a different link should discontinue preloading the previous assets.

Perhaps there is room for a paid version that crawls the linked pages a few times and preloads static assets. Who knows, perhaps you could load css, js and json as well as images and icons.

Or (to make it truly magical) make the amount of preloading depend on how slow a round trip resolves. If loading the favicon.ico (from the users location) takes 2+ seconds the html probably wont arrive any time soon.

Fun stuff, keep up the good work.

[1]- http://web.archive.org/web/20130329183223/http://widgets.ope...

Will this cause problems with "links" that are entirely rendered on the client side? i.e. using something like react-router... In that case, could it result in the react app setting invalid state because it thinks the user is on a page when it's not?

My guess is what would happen when "pre-fetching" a react-router link, is that it would prefetch the JS bundle all over again for no gain.

I'm just surprised at how slow my hover-to-click time was (never got it below 100ms). Thought it would be <50ms for sure when trying hard.

I had the same reaction. On a trackpad, I take a casual 300ms to click the damn link.

https://reactjs.org/ does it pretty well too.

Yeah, it's built with Gatsby which has this sort of behavior baked in https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

This is cool, and the license as shown at https://instant.page/license is the well-known MIT license, already known to be be an open source software license https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

A problem with the loading instructions is that it reveals, to an unrelated site, every single time any user loads the site that is doing the preloading. That is terrible for privacy. Yes, that's also true for Google Analytics and the way many people load fonts, but it's also unnecessary. I'd copy this into my server site, to better provide privacy for my users. Thankfully, since this is open source software, that is easily done. Bravo!

If you like to hyper optimize your site like me, and since it doesn't do any good on mobile (Edit: apparently it works on mobile, ignore this), you can have it selectively grab the script on desktop and save a few bytes like this:

    <script type="text/javascript">
      if (screen.width > 768) {
        let script = document.createElement('script');
        script.src = '//instant.page/1.0.0';
        script.type = 'module';
        script.integrity = 'sha384-6w2SekMzCkuMQ9sEbq0cLviD/yR2HfA/+ekmKiBnFlsoSvb/VmQFSi/umVShadQI';
        document.write(script.outerHTML);
      }
    </script>

The site claims it works on mobile

> On mobile, a user starts touching their display before releasing it, leaving on average 90 ms to preload the page.

It does mean we're trusting your service - we're executing your JS on our sites. But I do like that you're putting in the SHA hash so that we know you're not fudging it.

Just found that you have the source available too :) So overall, this is pretty cool.

I looked (quickly) through most of the comments below and couldn't answer these questions:

1) What, if anything, is the downside here?

2) Is (Google) analytics effected by the prefetch? That is, does that get counted as a page visit if the link that triggers this prefetch is not actually clicked?

Tia

The downside is that your pages’s HTML are loaded twice as much, this makes for additional load on your server.

Client-side analytics like GA aren’t affected.

> The downside is that your pages’s HTML are loaded twice as much

How? It would load the HTML just as often and not download it a second time as that would invalidate the usage

> this makes for additional load on your server.

True for users who hover over links they decide not to visit

Or am I misunderstanding something here?

If your html is gzipped, that's in the double digits of kilobytes for most cases. That's nothing compared to images and other content.

Is this kind of like turbolinks which Basecamp uses?

Similar in effect, but not in method. Turbolinks fetches pages after a click like normal, but swaps the body tag from the new page into the current page, cutting local render times.

Would it make sense to combine them? Instant turbo links.

Interesting. So this could be used internally in a web app i guess.

This is very nice idea, but isn't the problem initial liad time most of the time? How could we solve that?

Does this also work for all the outgoing links as well? I don't want to improve other sites rendering time at the expense of my own.

Very cool regardless.

>but isn't the problem initial liad time most of the time? How could we solve that?

Off the top of my head, a good way seems to be to write better sites that don't include 10mb of javascript libraries.

It doesn’t work for outgoing links because the gain wouldn’t be as much as the CSS and scripts of the external site need to be loaded in addition to the HTML (only the HTML can be preloaded).

Also, there’s usually no incentive to improve other’s sites pages load.

Works very well for me.

dieulot, is there a small bug with the allowQueryString check?

    const allowQueryString = 'instantAllowQueryString' in document.body.dataset

I think should be:

    const allowQueryString = 'instantallowquerystring' in document.body.dataset

If I have:

    <body  data-instantAllowQueryString="foo">

then

    'instantAllowQueryString' in document.body.dataset === false

and

    'instantallowquerystring' in document.body.dataset === true

because html data attributes get converted to lowercase by the browser (I think).

Uppercase is converted to added dashes. `document.body.dataset.instantAllowQueryString` corresponds to `data-instant-allow-query-string`.

Cool thanks! Didn't know that.

What would be the best way to integrate this in an app that already uses Turbolinks?

Exactly my thought. May be even better is to have it included in the next version of Turbolinks.

It doesn't seem to work for me. There are no JavaScript errors in the console* but the <button> that says "test your clicking speed" doesn't even have an event attached to it. Hovering over anything for multiple seconds doesn't fire any requests in the network panel.

Anyone else having this issue?

* Well, there's this, but I assume it's not dependent on google... `Loading failed for the <script> with source “hxxps://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-134140884-1"`

I am not sure if the clicking speed button is supposed to preload, or if its only intended for you to figure out your speed.

Are you using an older browser? It sounds like your browser doesn’t support JS modules.

I... Never heard of JavaScript modules. I feel very out of date now. Anyway, yeah, I'm using the latest Firefox that still supports real addons, some of which aren't even possible to reimplement using the latest APIs in nightly.

I don't know that the presence of a query string is a great indicator of whether the link causes state change (cue the typical GET immutability arguments, etc.).

For example, in Drupal every path (whether or not it causes state change) has 2 forms: "/?q=path/to/page" (when you don't have access to .htaccess or .conf) and "/path/to/page" (when you do, and you enable clean URLs).

Back when standards mattered, state changes were only in PUT, POST, and DELETE

The downside to this would be hovering over a document list, where you might pass by 15 records, GETting them all, until you click the one you really wanted.

But it is a clever idea. Applied carefully, it could give the impression of a speedier site. Of course, I see no reason to need a 3rd party for this... updating event handlers to operate this way shouldn't be outside the abilities of most web developers.

I wrote a very minimal GreaseMonkey script that adds this to every page: https://github.com/KieranHunt/instant.page/raw/master/instan...

"49 ms from hover to click" -- I guess I'm not exactly the target audience...

However, I find it very good the posted snippets include SRI, which sadly to this day almost every script CDN omits. The code is also small enough to just include it in projects, which avoids the external request entirely.

I thought that as well, but then I realised that I was literally moving my cross over the button and clicking as fast as I can. Thats not how I usually browse the web. I move my cursor usually where I am reading, which includes links, so I am hovering over it before I have decided to click it

I usually move the cursor out of the way, because I dislike it covering text or images. So when I do click on something I actually move over there and click immediately. How fast that goes is pretty much the textbook case of Fitts' law.

Wow this looks really great. Just tried it on my website[0], and page loads are pretty much instantaneous. However, it doesn't seem to work in Firefox 67 (Nightly). Does that mean it only works in Chrome?

[0]: https://freshman.tech

Firefox has a bug that makes it redownload the page if that page is not cached.

If the page is not cached, where is the browser going to get it except by redownloading?

You mean "if that page is cached"?

I guess nobody has mentioned this yet, but it presumably doesn't work on mobile?

I wonder if you could do something similar simply by looking at the viewport and loading all the links within the currently visible part of the page. Might be overkill though and end up wasting the user's data.

> On mobile, a user starts touching their display before releasing it, leaving on average 90 ms to preload the page.

From the article:

> On mobile, a user starts touching their display before releasing it, leaving on average 90 ms to preload the page.

Not sure how I missed that, thanks :)

A "1% improvement in conversion rate" is a big claim to make for a claim that seems so small.

That is, if you wanted to prove that "X is better than Y by 1%" you would need a sample approaching 10,000 attempted conversions to have a hope of having a good enough sample.

And I assume that’s why the author has put 4 references to that claim

There is a slew of case studies that support this line of thinking. Page speed impacts user retention and conversions.

See: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w...

According to the page, it was Amazon that made the original claim, so they would have the necessary sample size.

But there's no guarantee that it will apply for all pages.

I wish there were more examples on that page though. Where can I test this being used extensively?

Sounds too good to be true, but also brilliant. Curious what others think. What are the downsides?

Increased load on your web server, but other than that zero! (You might even be able to mitigate the load with caching). It progressively enhances existing links if JavaScript is enabled.

There are other libraries that do similar things, such as InstantClick: http://instantclick.io/

Assuming you use the script as suggested, letting a 3rd party site know your stats (and users) sounds like a non-trivial downside.

I'd surmise the author is benevolent, but if this were to be turned into a business, some kind of data play seems like the trivial next step.

As other comments have pointed out, you can run the js locally from your site instead.

Thanks. The only downside is that you can expect twice the number of requests to your pages (only the pages themselves, not their assets).

And you're using a lot more of the users'bandwidth

Where does their code get inserted? I could imagine it might help if it were added to the page you were linking from, but the site seems to indicate the code gets added to page you want to have load quickly -- the page you're linking to.

On the pages you’re linking from.

It would be great to deploy this on hacker news itself, at least on the "see comments" link of the main page. Page-loading is already blazingly fast, but my latency is still a bit high as I use a mobile internet connection.

You could try injecting the script yourself using a chrome extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/custom-javascript-...

Make it opt-in (vs opt-out)? As best I can tell, there is only the blacklist functionality (via a markup attribute). I can imagine many use cases where it would be far easier to only activate where a link has .instant-page.

I thought chrome already did this. Somebody else here pointed out that's impossible in general because even regular GET requests can have side effects. I wonder what it's doing with 1.6 GB of memory then...

I’m wondering if a possible use case for this is to use it to warm up app servers when doing deployments?

Enumerate through a list of pages on your site and use something like Puppeteer to simulate hovering over links on each page.

Why would you simulate hovering over links if you can just visit those URLs directly? If you want all links anyway, you lose the real optimization here, which is not the preloading itself, but limiting that to the (small) subset that a particular user seems interested in.

This is a good optimization. However, it is like pushing the mud under the carpet. It’ll hide real problem. I would rather fix the root cause of slow rendering pages and then use this trick to make it better.

I think it _could_ be used that way. If used properly, however, you’d make sure all your other ducks are in a row before using something like this as icing on the cake, so to speak.

But you make an important point.

I have just added it to a Shopify store to try it and it does indeed speed things up! However I am a little concerned with adding a script from another website... it requires a lot of trust, doesn'it?

> However I am a little concerned with adding a script from another website... it requires a lot of trust, doesn'it?

Not if you use the `integrity` attribute like the page recommends. If the file hash doesn't match the one given in the tag, the browser won't run the script.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

As another comment mentioned, you can just host the script on your own site.

Of course.... I was confused with the Cloudflare Workers thing... I just added the code directly to the website and it works fine. Thanks.

You can download the code to your own site, and serve it from there. It has an MIT license, and is on GitHub.

This should be implemented at the browser level, not in a webpage.

This is awesome! Added it to all the public pages of https://tinytracker.co - thank you, @dieulot :)

This is really impressive! I noticed the script uses `const` and `let` which might cause javascript errors in older browsers (https://caniuse.com/#search=let) so I ran it through the Google Closure compiler to compile it down to ES3 and it works great. https://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home

I've added it to my blog and a Django side project. Really speeds up page loads. Just need to add `data-no-instant` attribute to the logout link.

It’s loaded as a module so older browsers won’t execute it (and thus won’t choke on the modern syntax).

Oh. Interesting. I didn't know about modules.

Reminds me of this optimization by Netflix: https://medium.com/dev-channel/a-netflix-web-performance-cas...

The talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8oTJ8OZ5S0) was one of the most watchable performance optimization talks I've seen.

TLDR - they used a combination of the link prefetch technique, which works for HTML but is not fully supported by all browsers, as well as XHR prefetching, which will work for prefetching Javascript and CSS.

Looks very good! Love the landing page.

Testing on my dev box now. I’ll be rolling this out to a subset of users next week. Cool stuff!

Can this be easily tweaked to preload images as well, if desired? Or is their exclusion inherent in the method used?

As far as I can tell it just downloads the page. Nothing is parsed until you click the link, so there really isn't a reliable way of telling which images to load until then.

You could write something to parse the page and download images, but I don't recommend it. You risk a significant performance hit for the client, and a lot of wasted bandwidth for both client and server.

Does anyone know how using <link href=...> (this method) compares to using a hidden <iframe src=...> ?

Just set this up on guidevinetech.com, injected via tag manager. Works a treat, pages are definitely _fast_

Is there a demo somewhere? Beside the actual site that seems really well optimized already.

I wonder if you could use Greasemonkey to inject this into pages client-side...

This sounds like a computer processor's branch prediction algorithm.

Let's wait and see what creative ways will be found to exploit this optimization as well. :)

Could this be made as a browser extension?

Why not make the page itself faster?

https://forum.dlang.org/

click on subforums and threads.

Can we see the Cloudflare Worker?

I plan to release it later on.

Probably doesn't work with an agent that doesn't support hover events. Such as on tablets and smartphones.

Did you read the page? It uses touchstart events on mobile.

This comment is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Can I use this for static pages

Yes.

Also, how this can be free?

I thought CloudFlare was charging workers based on number of requests.

Cloudflare offers a free Pro plan to open source projects, I asked for Workers instead.

Awesome.

...I just keep my website lightweight, so I don't need to preload stuff...

Fascinating!

Live demo on my site as well @ https://pokatheme.com/

what kind of sorcery is this?

How does this work on devices with touch screen?

(My apologies if this question has already been raised)

(Your apology was rejected as it's clearly stated in the ultra short OP)

It prefetches on touch event while a "click" is normally triggered by a touch release.

> It prefetches on touch event while a "click" is normally triggered by a touch release.

So now I can't even touch my screen without being taken somewhere else, because I don't know where all the active areas are.

This is addressed in the article...

I wouldn't want to expose my various site's users to third party code execution like this.

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