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Comment by mr_justin | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm reading their demo wrong, their technique makes the page load slower (for me anyway): http://demos.digg.com/stream/streamDemo.html

Normal is consistently under 100ms and MXHR is around 400ms (using Safari 4 beta, OS X)

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I get the same thing with the text version. I refreshed 20 times and only got 1 that was faster (and only 7ms to boot).

But if you try this in a non-IE browser: http://demos.digg.com/stream/imageDemo.html

The image demo performs amazingly well! I wish there was a timer for that one but its extremely fast.

CORRECTION TO THIS BY AUTHOR: There is a timer, it just waits until all the normal images load (and I was too lazy to wait). Upon refreshing, the MXHR stream was 10.3x faster on my FF.

Hmm, I tried 10-20 times and MXHR was always slower. Sometimes a full half-second slower. I had some times approaching 1-second load time, meanwhile the "normal" load was consistently between 350-400ms.

I know it's just a proof of concept and yes, YMMV, but couldn't they come up with a demo that clearly showed this new technology they invented was worth using?

Use this trick instead of CSS sprites.

In all of the browsers I tried (FF3, IE8, Chrome), the timer gave me 4x slower using the MXHR stream on first try. But when I refreshed it was always wildly faster for the MXHR side (and still substantially faster on cache refresh).

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