Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting idea. Is there an intended use case? The page says to "speed up browsing on many websites by rendering them in the cloud", but as far as I can tell this also means we have to wait for the entire page to render before we are sent the png's. Along with the increased latency by going through FasterBadger instead of through the CDN's.

Or is it for sites where most of the times is spend on the rendering client side?

View on HN

It actually starts rendering even before the entire page is ready (and fixes up the page later; well, in the current version it just re-renders the page later). For some sites (news sites tend to be particularly bad here), rendering on the client takes significant time, especially with older phones - because of complex scripts, styles, many re-layouts/reflows, ads/trackers (which bring their own scripts/styles), and so on. Additionally, there's the issue of the number and size of network requests, which can be a problem over slow 3G connections. Of course, I could be wrong in these assumptions, and it could be the case that with improved networks, improved hardware and better-optimized sites none of this will be an issue. So FasterBadger is an experiment - will server-side rendering be enough of an improvement for people to change browsing habits? What about people with slower phones and slower networks, e.g. in developing countries? We're definitely finding sites today that e.g. don't display any content for a whole 30-60sec on an iPhone4 and display in mere seconds via FasterBadger, but of course not every site will be sped up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com