Keep last page until next page has loaded in overlay instead of spinner [#686926]

I am not sure if this is technically possible, but:

When you click around in admin pages without overlay (or in most any other web page), you see the old page until the new one has loaded (lest in some cases when the new page builds bit by bit). so the people know this behaviour from everywhere. The loading delay is filled by showing still the old page.

In the overlay we have an empty page and a spinner.
My A/B tests tell me that with overlay, the pages load only very little slower. But psychologically, with the spinner, it feels slower, and it is abit irritating, since blank pages always have a bit of a notion of something going wrong or your browser crashing. It also feels slower, because in our mindset, we associate spinners or progress bars with things that take veeery long.

So I believe it would be more natural if the overlay behaves the same as other web pages, and make it feel smoother and more natural.

Comments

Comment #1

kiphaas7 commented 16 January 2010 at 22:55

This is entirely technically possible, in fact, we're just hiding the old page untill (in order for the spinner to shine through, the spinner is a gif background image on a wrapper div) untill the new page is loaded, swap the new page in (still hidden) and show the new page.

What your saying does make sense. In fact, the initial overlay did have it (old page at opacity 0.2), but in combination with the spinner and opacity 0.2, it gave all sorts of performance issues (like in #667074: Very slow / delayed fade in with overlay on Firefox).

(The spinner is necessary, since all browsers also have some sort of spinner to show you that activity is going on.)

So if you have ideas how to do this without killing performance, great! I, for now, do not have any ideas :).

EDIT: Having opacity 0.2 was kinda weird also....