Use streaming JSON to reduce latency on mobile
As someone who <i>actually</i> regularly uses a slow mobile connection (8 kilobytes per second!) with somewhat high ping (~90ms to Google), please don&#x27;t do this thinking you&#x27;re making my life significantly better. It barely makes a difference in performance once loaded, and the initial load time is <i>ridiculously</i> worse. I&#x27;d much rather you make your page work <i>without JavaScript</i>, kept the design light (as this page has otherwise done), and make your CSS cacheable.<p>Right now, it takes over 5 seconds(!!) for this page to load because of all the freaking JavaScript it has to download! With JS off, the page loads <i>almost immediately</i>. With a keep-alive connection, subsequent loads over HTTPS are not particularly long, unlike what this article seems to think. (Hacker News is one of the FASTEST sites I can access, for example. Even on my crappy connection, pages load nearly instantly.)<p>Simply letting me type, press enter, and wait 0.1~0.3 seconds for a new page response would not be a significantly worse experience -- however, due to the way the site is written, search doesn&#x27;t work AT ALL with JS disabled.<p>So, lots of engineering effort (compared to just serving up a new page) for little to no actual speed improvement, and a more brittle website that breaks completely on unusual configurations... Yeah. Please don&#x27;t do this!