Opera Developer Comes With Address Bar Speculative Prerenderer Feature (opera.com) 59
Earlier this month, Opera announced a new interesting feature with Opera 43 developer that predicts the website you're about to go to. The company explains: There are two ways we can predict what page the user will soon load. When the current page tells us so, and when we can determine from the users actions that they are about to load something. Pages can use the tag, and for instance Google uses that for search results if they are pretty sure of what you will load next. When someone writes in the address bar they are humanly slow. Sometimes it is obvious what they will write after just 1-2 characters but they will just keep writing or arrowing through suggestions for millions or billions of wasted clock cycles. We expect this feature to results in an average of 1 second faster loads from the address bar. The company insists that this feature saves time and energy without compromising the security. What's your thought?
Whoa! 1 second! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Worked at one company where they gave all the new development to juniors and only seniors were allowed to fix the code base, stupid bloody idea, should be the other way around. Suffice to say they have a high staff turnover and code that makes an abortion seem neat and tidy (OK, for all I know abortions are neat and tidy, have no clue).
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, a whole second? Definitely should be implemented. Don't bother addressing the bug lists, only do new features. It is waaaaaay more fun.
For once we agree 100%.
Fixing bugs is so dreary, but potentially shaving an entire second off of getting to the next bit of clickbait or cat video, well that's just revolutionary!
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So arrowing through the suggestion list is bad because it uses "millions or billions of wasted clock cycles", but downloading and rendering an entire website is perfectly OK?
I think they meant that it wastes the user's time, not that it wastes clock cycles.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My thoughts exactly. Billions of cycles on the client's machine, billions of cycles on the different servers that are needlessly serving this speculative content for the first few incorrect guesses, billions of cycles on all the routers in between...
Where exactly do they think they are saving energy? One second of display power and idling cpu on the client side? I would be highly surprised if this would be net positive.
Yes, it will load pages slightly faster. But at the expense of quite a bit of wasted ener
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, but CPUs are extremely power efficient while in their idle state. CPUs down-clock and turn off internal components dynamically while not in use, even for a fraction of a second... Nothing is at waste at all here.
wasted resources (Score:2, Insightful)
Every failed guess is more bandwidth, server load, client load wasted.
Re: (Score:1)
[/sarcasm]
Protip (Score:5, Funny)
Never, ever type "goats e..." in Opera.
Sounds awful (Score:1)
What is going on here? (Score:2)
Is this the Opera development news feed now?
Why is Opera getting so much press lately? Did they hire a PR guy or something?
The Real reason (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Cynical me thinks this was done to game the browser usage statistics.
Cynical me agrees with you. It's only slightly different from adware that directs all your searches to their preferred site. "Yes, you typed 'Asthma Medication' but we predicted you were going to search for Viagra."
Provided the prediction engine is clever... (Score:3)
E.g. I type "o-p-e-r"...
Browser immediately opens "Download Google Chrome"* page.
*or other browser of your choice provided it doesn't have a mouth-frothingly insane "speculatively download and render potential malware" feature... because nobody ever left any security loopholes in any code ever.
Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.
Re: (Score:2)
Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyw... [mozillazine.org]
HTH, HAND.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, but had to laugh: from the article:
This article describes the preference keyword.enabled. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.
Someone has got the measure of the typical user...
Would be useless if... (Score:2)
Constant pre-loads (Score:3)
I'm thinking that the browser is constantly guessing what I'm going to try to load and is preemptively loading additional content in the background just in case it's right. It may eventually get the right answer, but more often than not it's probably going to be wrong; I'm just wondering how much additional bandwidth this feature is going to use.
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"Distracting mess"? The Google search homepage?!
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CPU cycles area cheap. Bandwidth is not. (Score:2)
Dear Silicon Valley (or in this case, Oslo): Kindly fuck off and quit acting like the whole world has the same nice gigabit FTTP connections you've come to enjoy. Over half of the US (and more than half of the planet) doesn't have effectively unli
Re: (Score:2)
Opera has this feature called Turbo which was basically a compressed web proxy - it really makes a difference on poor connections and was specially useful for me in the early days of mobile broadband data.
They really used to pioneer useful features back in the day...
This is sad. (Score:2, Offtopic)
I still remeber when Opera was the best browser around - not that long ago, in fact. I was a loyal fan until they became yet another Chromium skin and the company ditched their entire codebase, spending ages to release a non-Windows binary in the process.
I now look forward for Vivaldi.
Brits will appreciate (Score:2)
Their government logged and spied-on browsing history to be filled with unfortunate AI driven preload, when the algorithm land them into troubles.
I am sick and tired (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.bugmartini.com/comi... [bugmartini.com]
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Bingo. I'm gonna print this out and frame it.
I wish I could print a million copies and plaster one on the door of every developer everywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
That comment is a thing of beauty. The only thing I might add is that people too stupid or too lazy to learn the most basic requirements of how to work a computer shouldn't be allowed to use one in a way that might affect others.
Unintended consequences (Score:3)
Like Google's autocomplete for search? (Score:2)
If it's like the suggestions that Google puts up when I'm typing a search query, then it's useless and annoying to me, and I'd turn it off, just as I've turned Google's inept attempts at reading my mind. The problem is, the suggestions are almost always either wrong, or incomplete. It would be useful sometimes, if it allowed me to populate the search field with one of their suggestions and add text to the suggestion BEFORE they do the search.
In the case of Opera, what they consider 'obvious' has a good cha
Re:Like Google's autocomplete for search? (Score:5, Informative)
It would be useful sometimes, if it allowed me to populate the search field with one of their suggestions and add text to the suggestion BEFORE they do the search.
Ummm, it does. At least it does on my PC.
Start typing, use the arrow keys to move down to the suggestion you like, then type some more. You can revise the line as much as you like, backspace, add/remove words and text, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad I don't use Opera! (Score:2)
Burn that bandwidth! (Score:2)
What a great way to burn through all that extra bandwidth that you never use. *cough*
My thoughts? (Score:2)
The company insists that this feature saves time and energy without compromising the security. What's your thought?
Potentially wastes a lot of bandwidth and generates visit logs on sites I don't visit.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, there's the solution to permanent monitoring.
Everybody has visited every web page, so logging is useless.
Tada.
designing in a bubble (Score:2)