Re: Cache control in trailers?

On Wed, 10 Feb 2021, Willy Tarreau wrote:

> As a user, I hate it when an interrupted download is suddenly lost. You may 
> see an image start to display and suddenly disappear, or a download breaking 
> at 90% due to your ADSL being flaky and having to try again, etc. For me 
> each downloaded byte is valuable.

A cut off download can in most cases get retried and even resumed. Finding out 
that it was truncated does not need to equal disappearing. That's a UI 
problem, not a HTTP problem.

A cut off javascript download could probably become a security problem if it 
was cut off at exactly a very unfortunate point in the script. But again, not 
a HTTP problem really.

> Of course I would appreciate it if my browser asked me "this transfer was 
> interrupted, it may be a bug on the site, a network condition error or an 
> anti-malware detecting dangerous content, what do you want to do, try again, 
> try to continue, abort, keep it truncated ?" and that would be done.

If that happened in N% of your sessions and that other browser wouldn't annoy 
the user as much, users might find that as reason to just go to the other 
instead...

> One of the problems with the state of the web today *is* that we try to
> focus too much on user experience and avoid as much as possible to mention
> possible breakage.

I'm with you a 100% on this, but that doesn't actually help much.

I claim the reason "we" are this sensitive is because how the browser economy 
works. Users equals money to browsers so if you scare off your users to make 
them go use another browser that doesn't show the scary warning or is more 
okay with "broken" sites, the browser vendor lose money. They rather keep the 
users and instead compromise on protocol strictness (or at least hide some of 
the issues).

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2021 09:24:21 UTC