Pages start loading sooner: smarter connections and a faster path onto slow networks

A networking release about the moment before a page even begins to draw: how quickly the browser reaches the servers a page needs. Three changes. First, on a network where one internet lane is broken (a half-configured IPv6 route, common on cafe and hotel Wi-Fi) Floati no longer waits out the dead connection before trying the other lane. It now opens attempts to both at once and takes whichever answers first, so a page that used to hang for seconds starts loading right away. Second, Floati now acts on a page's own advance notice of the other servers it will pull fonts, images and scripts from, opening those connections while the main page is still arriving instead of waiting until each file is first needed, whether the site sends that notice ahead of the page (an early-hints reply) or lists it inside the page. On a live test against a major site the first fetch to a hinted server came back about 65 percent sooner. Third, two older faults are fixed: a page could arrive blank from a server that uses early hints, and stray hint information could leak into a page's data. This is groundwork as much as polish, part of building the connection layer from scratch to match a mainstream browser and then move past it. Networking moves 55 to 59; overall holds at 70.