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Discussion on: dev.to’s Frontend: a brain dump in one act

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yucer profile image
yucer

Basically the way it works is if a user hovers over a hyperlink, chances are their intentions are to click on it. InstantClick will start prefetching the page while a user is hovering over a hyperlink, so that by the time they do click on it, it's instantaneous.

I hope it has no equivalent in the mobile version, because there I use it mostly with data charge$$$ from my telecom company. Normally one doesn't want to pay for reading stuff that would eventually read.

Is there any feature to save an article to read it offline afterwards ? I mean like the "reading list". Something like the "offline reading list" ? That would be better for the mobile version because allows to explicitly select the future stuff to read.

Most of the time I have to read articles in the subway or another areas without internet coverage. For others applications what I do is that I save the content in my handy using home wifi when I know in advance that I would not be able to connect to internet. Does anybody else have the same uses cases ?

Or maybe the solution is to specify which tags can be prefetched in advances. If the link points to one article of those authorized tags then InstantClick might be used. At least is a little more of control.

Maybe an "interest" field by tag ? Or allow the user to sort the tag list and set the Instantclick threshold?

Also the prefetched articles by the hover action could be accessible from the "offline reading list".

Maybe I am proposing stuff that is already covered by Instantclick, in such a case just ignore it. :-)

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

For InstantClick, on mobile devices, preloading starts on “touchstart”. I'll update the post with this. For offline reading, that sounds like a great feature request.