194536 - Finish loading pages in the background

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Chapel]

Currently, Mozilla doesn't finish loading pages after you've left them. If you
later go back to a page that didn't finish loading before you left it, it will
continue loading from where it left off. It seems to me that unused bandwidth
could be used to finish loading the page so that it's all in the cache when you
go back.

To see how this would improve Mozilla, follow these steps:
1. Go to http://www.snopes2.com/
2. Quickly click on the "What's New" link at the top center of the window.
3. Wait for several seconds after the What's New page has finished loading.
4. Click the Back button.

After you click the Back button, the previous page finishes loading from where
it left off, even if there was plenty of time and bandwidth to completely load
the page. If you didn't click the "What's New" link fast enough the first time,
clear the caches and try again.

With this feature, the entire page would appear immediately after clicking Back.
It would make Mozilla appear faster than it is now, and also help to improve
Mozilla usage statistics. In many ways it's similar to link prefetching.

This feature would be on by default, but could be turned off by those who pay
for bandwidth or who open links in new tabs to simulate this feature. Loading
pages previous visited in the background would have a lower priority than
loading currently open pages or prefetching pages -- it would use only bandwidth
that would otherwise go unused, assuming a constant amount of bandwidth
available to Mozilla.

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

not really cache, let's try networking:http

Comment 2

[Steve Chapel]

How about continuing to load pages that are in the bfcache? That would help bfcache work better, and also fill up the disk cache with files that are likely to be needed again soon.

Comment 3

[dE]

Would be nice to have this as an optional feature, but turned off by default.