[webkit-dev] Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

[James Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:00 PM, James Robinson <jamesr at google.com> wrote:
>>
>> It seems like a browser will have to essentially stop rendering until
>> it has finished downloading the entire .zip and examined it.
>
> I think mitigating this is why there are optional manifests.  I agree that
> if there's no manifest, this is really, really painful.  I think manifests
> should be made mandatory.
> PK

Do you mean external manifests?  Either way, the browser cannot start
a download for any external resource until it downloads and parses out
the manifest.txt for every resource bundle seen in the page so far.
Whether it is pulling the manifest out of a .zip file or as a .txt by
itself doesn't matter much, it's still an extra HTTP round-trip before
any content can be downloaded (including content that is not bundled
at all).

- James