instant

Dev tools

frontend performance script

SHOW HN2019

1,214points
337comments
#3of 2,195 in 2019
Top 1%of 2019 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

32 positive, 99 neutral or asking, 7 mixed, 39 critical, out of 177 comments about the project. Thread score -0.05.

Idea: 10 for, 13 againstExecution: 7 for, 6 againstPrivacy: 2 for, 11 againstPerformance: 3 for, 7 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Makes page loads feel noticeably faster with little effort

    From 3 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…
      WestCoastJustin on HN
    • Just set this up on guidevinetech.com, injected via tag manager. Works a treat, pages are definitely _fast_
      bigbadgoose on HN
    • 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…
      mars4rp on HN
  • Small, easy to add with SRI hashes provided

    From 2 comments
    • "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…
      blattimwind on HN
    • 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…
      elliotec on HN

Objections

  • Doubles page requests to the server

    From 2 comments
    • Thanks. The only downside is that you can expect twice the number of requests to your pages (only the pages themselves, not their assets).
      dieulot on HN
    • 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.
      dieulot on HN
  • Loading a third-party script is a privacy and trust risk

    From 4 comments
    • 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.
      ahnick on HN
    • 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…
      SkyLinx on HN
    • I wouldn't want to expose my various site's users to third party code execution like this.
      superkuh on HN
    • 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…
      dwheeler on HN
  • Does not work on touch devices without hover

    From 2 comments
    • Probably doesn't work with an agent that doesn't support hover events. Such as on tablets and smartphones.
      amelius on HN
    • 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…
      lol768 on HN
  • Prefetching could cause unwanted server load or analytics skew

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      js4ever on HN
    • 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).…
      cjblomqvist on HN

Requests

  • Make it opt-in rather than opt-out

    From 1 comment
    • 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…
      technotarek on HN
  • Browser extension or browser-level implementation

    From 3 comments
    • Could this be made as a browser extension?
      geophertz on HN
    • This should be implemented at the browser level, not in a webpage.
      amelius on HN
    • Perhaps this something that a browser should be doing, instead of websites themselves?
      saagarjha on HN
  • Source code for the Cloudflare Worker

    From 1 comment

Questions

  • How does it compare to Google quicklink

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      muppetman on HN
    • Same preloading technique but quicklink preloads more agressively.
      dieulot on HN
  • Does it work on mobile or touch screens

    From 2 comments
    • How does this work on devices with touch screen? (My apologies if this question has already been raised)
      harshulpandav on HN
    • 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…
      lol768 on HN
  • Does it affect analytics

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      chiefalchemist on HN
    • 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.
      dieulot on HN

Alternatives named

  • InstantClick

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      rprime on HN
    • 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…
      dieulot on HN
  • Google quicklink

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      muppetman on HN
    • Same preloading technique but quicklink preloads more agressively.
      dieulot on HN
  • Turbolinks

    From 2 comments
    • Is this kind of like turbolinks which Basecamp uses?
      ThomPete on HN
    • What would be the best way to integrate this in an app that already uses Turbolinks?
      sfusato on HN
  • Next.js link prefetch

    From 1 comment
    • 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…
      jypepin on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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