Firefox 2.0 Persistent Storage - speed up your Web 2.0 Apps!

I spent some time and created a proof-of-concept page that demonstrates how much faster sites could be if they started supporting the client-side persistent cache from Firefox 2.0. Basically the first time the page loads it checks to see if this element is already stored - if not it fetches it from the net. After the page has finished loading it then goes and stores that javascript code (imagine some big DHTML library of stuff) into the client-side storage. Then, when the page is reloaded sometime in the future, that data is pulled from the storage instead of from the cache or fetched off the network.

In my testing with big scripts it could take up to 300 msec to load some js. However getting the same code from client-side cache would take anywhere from 0 - 10 msec! That's huge!

Give it a try and consider adding optimizations for client side storage to your bloated js intensive web app :)

NOTE: You need to also have Firebug installed to see the console timing for yourself. Otherwise you'll see JS errors.