On preloading web pages:
I agree with most followups on this, that preloading all links
from a page is not a particularly good idea, especially if you do
it automatically on every page you hit. It would be a nice option
to be able to invoke manually, per link, as Greg suggests. In
the Jesse Berst column where he metioned the Java tool, most
of the followup posts also saw the flaw that it would clog the
internet even more, with a lot of wasted traffic, if it caught on.
Greg wrote:
Here is what I would like to see instead: When I am reading a complicated web page I would like to be able to click on a specific link with the right mouse button and choose an option to load the link in the background.
I'd like this too. I've discovered something similar, though
not quite as convenient. In netscape 3.0, on Unix at least,
the middle mouse button will start up a new browser on the link
you click. Then, another click on the border will push the new
browser window down to the bottom of the window stack. This
ends up leaving me a pile of defered pages to read, already loaded
and ready to go in their own windows, when I finish reading the
main thread I'm following. This works particularly well for
following references here in SI, where the links usually go to heavy
traffic news servers that are often slow in responding.
Conveniently, if you hit the back button in the new window, the
browser will take you back to the refering page, so you can get
the context of the link. If it were possible to automatically
push the new window to the bottom of the window stack, instead
of having to hide it manually, I'd be a happy camper; maybe
there's some secret config option to do this???
I've no idea if you can do this under windows though. Probably need
to add swap space...
Cheers, Dan. |
