MDN Plus

I use documentation sources like MDN (via Zeal) or Rust docs (via local files loaded in the browser) while offline not uncommonly—I might go for a few months without doing so, but then I might go for a week of accessing them offline daily. Knowing that I don’t depend on an internet connection for it is very desirable.

But even when I have an internet connection, offline versions of most of these sorts of resources load considerably faster, mostly because I’m in Australia and these resources are normally hosted from America. My experience is that Americans that have always been in America and then travel to the other side of the world are consistently surprised at how slow the internet is away from the USA—and it’s all about latency, not bandwidth.

But I am compelled to admit that the performance angle is fairly negligible for MDN: it’s one of the extraordinarily rare sites that actually loads fast, with nearby TLS termination and content distribution and evidently nothing too outrageous in their coding so that it can consistently load to completion on my admittedly fast laptop from a cold cache and no open connections in well under two second, regularly under one.