Google Gears for IPB?

[kafloo]

is there a plan to incorporate the use of google gears with IPB to speed up the loading of the pages?

wordpress 2.6 now has it with the turbo link inside the dashboard which caches locally some of the files (css, images, etc.)

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/gears/

;)

[Digi]

And requires a 3rd party download. No thanks.

[bfarber]

I honestly can't see the usefulness in this really.

I've taken a look at gears for things I CAN see usefulness in (such as, storing your read topics, which would offload a lot of server stress to your browser) but the lack of support, the required third party installation, and so on make it an unattractive option.

[henke37]

I would rather have some prefetch hints as supported by some browsers. Could be neat to preload the next page while reading the current page.

[bfarber]

Yes, for the user, but what about the person paying the server costs? If it were supported in IPB, that means the browser could attempt pulling what it thinks will be the "next" page, utilizing bandwidth, that the user may never read. In other words...it could end up wasting a lot of server resources to make the next page load faster for the user.

At what point does the tradeoff become balanced. That's difficult to answer.

[henke37]

That's why there is preloading hints, to tell the browser about things that the user extremely likely will want soon.
Besides, (related to an bug in the tracker that I reported), it is up to the admin in question if he wants to support it or not. It is not hard to create an acp setting.

[W13]

++ To what Bfarber said, and also consider: people often spend a long time reading a topic, and the browser may pre-fetch the next topic, but the by the time they click the link after reading their topic, the new topic has already changed (new replies).