[maemo-developers] WebKit Incremental Layout

[From: Alp Toker]

David Carson wrote:
> the main issue that it tries to address is that on really really slow 
> networks, the user goes to a site and takes a long time to load, and 
> they think the browser has stopped working or is not doing anything and 
> give up and cancel the load.
> By showing some content, some progress, the user can see that there is 
> activity and will continue to wait for the page to load.
> Again, this is for slow network connections (ie low bandwidth)

I used this on a real mobile device with a slow connection for a couple 
of weeks to get a feel for it.

As a browser developer, the feature at first seemed neat. But as an end 
user I found that the appearance of styling up to ~10/20 seconds later 
was annoying, since by that point I'd already started reading the 
unstyled content and was getting the information I needed. The 
subsequent CSS load often meant I had to find the newly-styled paragraph 
and start reading it all over again.

Maybe it's subjective, and maybe there's a technical solution to make 
the transition from unstyled to styled content less distracting. I've 
pinged some other mobile browser developers to get their thoughts on this.