Like most technology, the Internet has come a long way from where it was in years past in terms of speed. However, also like most technology, web pages and apps have added more features to take advantage of that, which can really dampen the effect of all that progress. Now, thanks to some code developed at MIT, we can take better advantage of some of that speed.
When a web page is loaded, your Internet browser of choice needs to seek out, load, and deal with different parts like bits of HTML, images, JavaScript, and anything else the page uses. However, with all these assets interconnected and dependent on each other in different ways depending on a page’s code, browsers don’t really know the most efficient course of action on a given page. With a new system known as Polaris, a team at MIT has written JavaScript code that can be used in any unmodified browser to help identify the most efficient order of operations on any page.
Basically, regular page loading is like having a to-do list but not knowing which order is best to accomplish the items. You might get deep into the process of one task only to discover that you need to stop and complete another before coming back and starting the first all over again. Polaris helps order the tasks ahead of time. In general, according to the team’s paper, Polaris was able to speed up page loading by about 34%, and it got even better results in a few cases.
Though it can currently be added to any page and work in any browser, the team hopes that, eventually, Polaris will be a native part of web browsers and enable even further optimization. Maybe things will get so fast that you don’t even feel the need for an ad blocker anymore! (Not that you use one of those, right?) What a great consolation prize for our low American Internet speeds.
(via Gizmodo, image via Dennis Skley on Flickr)
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