It's not for every clicker. Really fast clicker won't get the benefit. Also, if the prefetch starts without finishing before the click happens the browser terminates the request and that's fine.
My next endeavor ought to be to try to measure how many percent of people benefit from this prefetching. I wonder if it'd be possible to do with google analytics.
I'm wondering how much of the benefit is real, and how much of the benefit is placebo effect?
I'm more of an avid laptop user, and I live exclusively in trackpad land. That means there's no mouse for me to fumble around with, and so I'm not actively moving my mouse over links. Instead, I click the links immediately after I move my mouse into the said link, leaving very little time for it to pre-load the contents.
Additionally, with the inspector open, there is an observable (if nothing else, at least by gamers, so <1/30th of a second?) delay from hovering into the link, and start seeing network activity.
So, unless the user is slow, or have a crazy good connection with your server, I think it is entirely possible that between the time of entering the link, and clicking, the preload doesn't finish, and a new request gets made instead of pulling from cache, thus using more bandwidth?
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It's not for every clicker. Really fast clicker won't get the benefit.
Also, if the prefetch starts without finishing before the click happens the browser terminates the request and that's fine.
My next endeavor ought to be to try to measure how many percent of people benefit from this prefetching. I wonder if it'd be possible to do with google analytics.
Parent comment
I'm wondering how much of the benefit is real, and how much of the benefit is placebo effect? I'm more of an avid laptop user, and I live exclusively in trackpad land. That means there's no mouse for me to fumble around with, and so I'm not actively moving my mouse over links. Instead, I click the links immediately after I move my mouse into the said link, leaving very little time for it to pre-load the contents. Additionally, with the inspector open, there is an observable (if nothing else, at least by gamers, so <1/30th of a second?) delay from hovering into the link, and start seeing network activity. So, unless the user is slow, or have a crazy good connection with your server, I think it is entirely possible that between the time of entering the link, and clicking, the preload doesn't finish, and a new request gets made instead of pulling from cache, thus using more bandwidth?