Site owner here! Even if it did take that long, browsers are clever enough not to wait until all the HTML is fetched as HTML can be processed in a streaming fashion. You can see here that stylesheets https://www.webpagetest.org/customWaterfall.php?test=240913_... are requested from the first bunch of HTML.
A second is little disappointing, but in fairness my lowly, single CPU, single core server with only 1 GB of RAM (a t2.micro server on AWS) was struggling a little with the load that Hacker News sent to it yesterday (16,000 page views in a day compared to about a third of that number for the whole month before that!). Plus the images on this page are a particularly big (because they are quite detailed so can't compress them more without losing that detail). So it was probably a bit slower than usual. At the minute everything is served from that one server (no CDN either at the mo - I really should stick it behind Cloudflare). It was a little play thing for me to test stuff out with, that became an occasional blog too on the side.
My question was more of a "WTF is Firefox doing in the ~700ms between when the HTML has finished a network transfer and before the .css file is requested?"
I just tried it today and things are, in general, much faster (presumably due to the reduced load), but there is still over 500ms between when the .html completes the download and the .css is queued for transfer.
[edit]
I just tried it in a private window and most of the delay disappears, so I suspect extensions.
You can already do this with JavaScript now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo... though as you can see from the bottom of that link, Browser support is limited at the moment (and experimental so may even be removed/changed!).
From the post:
“That leads nicely into the privacy implications of using third-party CDNs. You have no idea what sort of tracking they are doing to your users by using them, rather than self-hosting. And recent legislation means a lot of sites have to explicitly list all the cookies used on the site, which gets more complicated when using a third-party.“
Is any site using this? It requires a special certificate and signing your content (which admittedly Cloudflare will take care of for you) but even then it’s only for Chrome and Firefox and Apple have said they won’t support it. Over a year after announcing it I’ve yet to find a single site that does this.
Yeah I was trying to figure out what to do with that one. In the end I “corrected” it as suggested but could have gone either way depending whether Manning is a singular company or a plural collection of people.
A second is little disappointing, but in fairness my lowly, single CPU, single core server with only 1 GB of RAM (a t2.micro server on AWS) was struggling a little with the load that Hacker News sent to it yesterday (16,000 page views in a day compared to about a third of that number for the whole month before that!). Plus the images on this page are a particularly big (because they are quite detailed so can't compress them more without losing that detail). So it was probably a bit slower than usual. At the minute everything is served from that one server (no CDN either at the mo - I really should stick it behind Cloudflare). It was a little play thing for me to test stuff out with, that became an occasional blog too on the side.