60787 - Mozilla should display cached pages before downloading them

Status: NEW

(Core :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Loco]

Happens in: All Platforms.

Reason for Severity: Would solve some day-to-day problems.

Reproducible: N/A

Steps to Reproduce: 
1. Load any page

Actual Results: Page loads after contents are downloaded.

Expected Results: Would be nice if contents were displayed *before* they were 
downloaded.

Related to:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60455

As an additional note, what would happen if you "FUTURE" this bug?

Comment 1

[Todd]

According to Microsofts Marketing hype, i was under the impression that IE 6.0
had this... ;).

Comment 2

[Loco]

Dr. Brain, good catch.  I thought about it, but decided against making a 
dependency...Thinking again though, it would indeed solve at least part of the 
problem causing bug 60455.  Well done!

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

I'm not going to get to this anytime soon.  reassigning

Comment 4

[Niels Aufbau]

This would be very useful for porn surfing, because downloading porn causes
pop-up ads to appear.

Comment 5

[Francisco León]

erm... being a bit serious here, could we actually make mozilla display the 
text inside a webpage *before* loading up images?

Many pages that mozilla wont load until every bit is loaded first... It's 
really frustrating, especially "in-fly-generated formats" like php

Comment 6

[Markus Hübner]

This could become a topperf I guess ;)

Comment 7

[u12624]

How about an option to show the latest cached version of the page, grayed out to
show it's not the latest version but still visible, then update text and images
as it's downloaded. If the site is dead, keep the gray cached version, with a
404 error somewhere. Refreshing.

I'm having deja vu all over again thinking about this cache rfe: was discussed
on wishlist many milestones ago.

Comment 8

[Damian Yerrick]

Update subject per Jeandré's clarification in order to catch dupe searches
for "cache".

Comment 9

[Denis (Russia)]

:DDDDDDDDD

Comment 10

[marek]

(In reply to comment #9)
> :DDDDDDDDD

Comment 11

[marek]

(In reply to comment #9)
> :DDDDDDDDD

(In reply to comment #4)
> This would be very useful for porn surfing, because downloading porn causes
> pop-up ads to appear.

Comment 13

[[:Aleksej]]

See also bug 510119.

Comment 14

[Ruben]

Imagine: all those google-searches, that you already searched before; All those pages that you just use to find a link to another page.

I suggested to show a big hint "this is the cached version from {date}. loading... ".
once the page is loaded, the page is replaced with the updated content (and on many pages not much will change)

Also if you lost your internet connection, you could still read most pages, that are cached.


If this would be the new default behaviour in Firefox, this would save **a lot** of bandwidth and energy worldwide!

We should give this a higher priority.

Comment 15

[Ruben]

https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/topics/mozilla_should_display_cached_pages_before_while_downloading_them

Comment 16

[david.vanderwerf]

I wonder why more people don't consider this important.  Maybe people think it's a joke after only reading the title.  If people understood what it would do, I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want it to happen.  It could be unchecked as an option for anyone who doesn't like it.

I prefer the "big hint" idea to having a greyed out page.  Maybe the background color of the location bar could be a different color such as yellow, and the url text could greyed out in italics. The message about it being the cached version and loading could be in the foreground of the location bar in bold letters.

In addition to being irritated having to wait 1 or several seconds for the new version to download, I don't understand why even displaying the cached version of the webpage requires a noticeable lag.  It is usually several tenths of a second, maybe even half a second.  Is this time being used by the layout engine, re-parsing HTML, etc?  If so, I have an idea: Couldn't the data obtained from these functions also be saved in the cache, so that Firefox doesn't need to go through the processing again?  It would be like storing images.  If this were done, clicking on links to pages that are cached would lead you *in real time* to the next page.  It would be like clicking forward on a photo gallery program - instant update of the display with zero delay.

Comment 17

[Ruben]

everyone please vote this up on Getsatisfaction: http://gsfn.us/t/38wmg

Comment 18

[Ruben]

The layer, that indicates, that this is the cached version should be accessible via CSS, so the website admin can customize the message so the style fits inTO the overall website design (especially important if HTML-(i)frames are used)