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Comment by noisem4ker | Hacker News Reader

>it triggers the page load when the user starts pressing their mouse

This breaks the standard GUI interaction model. Buttons are typically triggered on mouse-up events, not mouse-down, and there's probably good reasons for that.

Any client-side hacks that attempt to improve the perceived page speed are somehow bound to break something. If there really is a simple way, it's already been implemented at the browser level, for all websites. Link prefetching is already a thing. Do you want fast pages? Make your server-side rendering fast.

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> Do you want fast pages? Make your server-side rendering fast

Yeah.. imagine being so thirsty for page load efficiency that you ignore all the bloat of JavaScript and poor server-side rendering but instead directly skip to breaking the standardized GUI/UX

instant.page is 1.1kB and encourages efficient server-side rendering.

Sorry if my comment came in kinda offensive, it's a general stance I was criticizing, not your project in particular! Your offer is based on an existing demand, so who should feel addressed are those who use solutions like yours.

There’s a joke about two bankers walking down wallstreet. One says to the other: “my gosh look, there’s a 100$ bill on the ground”. The other without looking down turns to him and says: “Impossible! iIf there was 100$ on the ground someone would have picked it up!”

But note that keyboard things operate on key down. Software operating on key up has caused me surprisingly much grief. I can think of two systems I interact with, off the top of my head, that trigger things on Escape key up, which is badly wrong in that I often do Alt down → Tab press → no wait, I do want to be here → Escape press → Alt up, and so the browser which didn’t see the Escape down (because it didn’t belong to it) does see the Escape up, and improperly cancels what I was in the middle of or similar. This is so annoying.

Buttons are typically triggered on mouse-up events, not mouse-down, and there's probably good reasons for that.

So you can drag the link somewhere else. Like to the desktop or a text editor or a terminal window.

Yep. This convention also enables the cancellation of a click, which can be useful if you realise your error mid-click.

Another piece of software egregious for violating this UI convention is Adobe Reader. I remember upgrading to, IIRC v9? and finding that all buttons in it had been changed to actuate on mouse-down, and wondering what the christ the developers were thinking. Perhaps they thought it made their software seem more "responsive".

This is incorrect. It starts loading on mouse down, but still acts on mouse up.

Not the case on the https://instant.page website. If you mouse down links, the page changes.

It doesn't - try drag-dropping one of the links in their sidebar into a new tab. You get the page changed before you lift the mouse button.

No. Mouse down on any of the sidebar links on that site to see for yourself.

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