So Next.JS actually pre-fetches links when they move into the viewport or you hover over it. It's interesting, but then you get wasted battery on mobile while on bad networks. The world is full of tradeoffs. Tech workers tend to want to consume more battery and data to be faster. Other people want to do less work.

https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/prefetching#hover-trigger...

In my view, websites should not take seconds to load with gigabit fiber. Whatever happened to "mobile first"?

> pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain

I don't think the current crop of fullstack engineers would be hard pressed to know what a "markov chain" is, but in theory yes, you could emit a bunch of speculation rules[1] based on your predictions.

I should also say that markov chain based approaches have been used for fraud detection, e.g. identifying checkout anomalies by detecting the sequence of web pages that they clicked on, amongst other factors.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation...

McMaster Carr website prefetches _all_ links upon hover. Saves you like half a second in many cases.

The problem isn't in preloading, it's in how much data needs to be sent while quite probably most of the data could be either fetched on startup in an efficient format and rendered natively, or is completely unnecessary in the first place (telemetry, ads).

Oh god, don't give them ideas. All ML is in-cloud AI now. I dread the day everything around my mouse movements needs to get tokenized and vibed into the ClosedAI cloud before my buttons start working again.

If we stored the edges (links) and nodes (pages) separately, rather than requiring you to blindly run a node's code just to discover what its edges might be, then you could skip the prediction and instead pre-cache the next hop for all edges just in case you follow one. You could even do this to two or three hops.

This might seem wasteful, but if the web were content addressed instead of server addressed you could then be serving that cache to your municipality even after it became disconnected from the rest of the internet. Which sort of recasts it not like wastefulness but instead like fault tolerance and preparedness.

We could maybe even dispense with the servers entirely.

There are so many different ways to build a web. Why does it feel like we've landed on the worst possible one?

This exist but the downside is that it uses much more of your bandwidth and client resources (probably not matter in many cases but it does if on a phone in a country with bad connection) and your server resources (if not mostly static content)

I would assume a big part of software have plenty of lower hanging fruits for speedup and don't even profile to find where the bottlenecks are

Heh, this is how browser accelerators from the dial up era worked