[webkit-dev] Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

[James Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Alexander Limi <limi at mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> Good people of Webkit!
>
> We'd all like for the web to be faster, and therefore I'd love your feedback on my proposal — it would be great to see support for this in additional browsers, not just Firefox:
>
> http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages/
>
> Summary:
> What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS, images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do.
>
> Looking forward to hear your thoughts on this.

It seems like a browser will have to essentially stop rendering until
it has finished downloading the entire .zip and examined it.  This
will most likely slow down the time taken to render parts of the page
as they arrive. From the blog post:

"A given browser will probably block downloading any resources until
the lists of files that are available in resource packages have been
accounted for — or there may be a way to do opportunistic requests or
similar, we leave this up to the browser vendor unless there’s a
compelling reason to specify how this should work."

This also means that a browser would have to stop tokenizing the HTML
when it hits the next <script src=""> tag, since it would be unable to
know if the javascript was in the bundled zip or not.  This seems to
go against the idea that as much of the page be rendered as fast as
possible.

- James

>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience · http://limi.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> webkit-dev mailing list
> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>