Technology Development

RIM has recently filed a patent that will prioritize certain aspects of a webpage. This method, in conjunction with the previous patent we saw about using proxy servers, should help to speed up the load times of webpages.


The basis for this is to load certain parts of a webpage that the user might want to see first. Currently, a user might wait a few minutes for a whole webpage to appear simply because of a javascript or CSS code is sluggishly loading. This new method will switch things in order and will make the first loaded elements of the webpage to appear first (often times the content, which is what the user wants to see first anyway).



Here is a snippet from the patent to further describe the prioritized queuing in detail:

Therefore, there is a need for a method and system whereby a first device (e.g. a wireless handheld device or mobile station) may send a request to a second device (e.g. a wireless gateway server or other server) for response data having a higher priority than response data for an earlier request which is still transferring to the first device from the second device. In accordance with an embodiment of the invention, an HTTP header for a send request is adapted to include a priority indication of the request’s relative priority (e.g.: x-rim-priority-request “priority number”). The priority indication instructs a gateway to order the response data for the request so that the response data for the request arrives at the requesting device ahead of lower priority response data that may be in the gateway’s send queue.

It will be very interesting to see if this is integrated into the upcoming webkit browser. This is a good sign nonetheless, that RIM is seriously focusing on their browser. Perhaps, BlackBerrys will one day have a browser that the competition seeks to emulate.