[webkit-dev] Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

[Alex Russell]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:00 PM, James Robinson <jamesr at google.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think that's not entirely true. In zip archives the manifest comes
first and can be examined while the rest of the body is still
downloading.

>  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!