Impact of the UA’s heuristics

[KenjiBaheux]

A UA heuristic could be that popular sites get prerendered more frequently, and thus appear faster to load to the visitor, so more desirable to visit, therefore prerendered sites become more popular, creating a cycle where - so to speak - the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This may lead to a concentration of power around a particular group of sites in any given sector. from issue #92 by @rhiaro

[KenjiBaheux]

The goal is to help users spend less time waiting for websites to load and get things done faster.

So, a UA would probably want to design its heuristics so that it delivers the most value (largest amount of time saved) per wasted byte, or solely based on the expected benefits in scenarios where the relatively small amount of extra bytes is essentially free.

The UA might therefore apply prerendering to sites based on how much faster they stand to get (e.g. from data with regular page loads). For instance, a UA may want to pass on opportunities that wouldn’t be perceived as significantly faster (e.g. sites that are already reasonably fast), and leave headroom for websites that would benefit more from a speed boost (e.g. sites that are slower than what a user is used to). This could help less popular / less resourceful websites achieve better page load performance, thereby helping with leveling the playing field on speed aspects.

An alternative “solution” would be to artificially slow down every page load to be equal to one another, and identical regardless of which browser is used. Clearly, this will never work :)

It’s easy to theorize what might happen and still be totally wrong in practice, or be right until the ecosystem inevitably reacts. Which is why it’s best to leave room for the UA to explore different heuristics and adjust them over time.

That said, I think we shouldn’t over-index on speed as a success factor. It’s only a secondary (after the fact even) factor in how users decide which sites to visit. There are far more important factors that sites should pay attention to before worrying about having these ultra fast page loads: relevancy, familiarity, low friction experience (e.g. login, payment), quality of service, etc.