Simon Willison’s Weblog

22nd May 2022 - Link Blog

Paint Holding - reducing the flash of white on same-origin navigations. I missed this when it happened back in 2019: Chrome (and apparently Safari too—not sure about Firefox) implemented a feature where rather than showing a blank screen in between page navigations Chrome “waits briefly before starting to paint, especially if the page is fast enough”. As a result, fast loading multi-page applications become almost indistinguishable from SPAs (single-page apps). It’s a really neat feature, and now that I know how it works I realize that it explains why page navigations have felt a lot snappier to me over the past few years.