- Published on
How Fast Can We Go?
- Authors
- Name
- John Siwicki
- @siwicadilly
I am always looking for new ways that we can speed up all of our web properties. There has been a lot of new features that we have been able to tap into. Chrome pushed out native lazy loading for images and iframes.
Support for new browser standards like prefetch and pre-connect has been getting more adoption. But, I came across a simple JS plugin that weights in at 1kb but does a whole lot for you.
Instant does something clever and will start to preload a page right before the user clicks on it. How do they do this?
When a user has hovered for 65 ms, there is one chance out of two that they will click on that link, so instant. The page starts preloading at this moment.
"A user starts touching their display before releasing it, leaving on average 90 ms for the page to preload."
So, it will just listen and look for these events on your page. In some early tests, I was able to see the browser to start loading that content as soon as I left a cursor over that page for a bit.
If you are looking for something small and simple to add to your arsenal of Web Performance plugins, this could be an excellent way to get that more fluid experience on your properties for your users.