Instant Previews: Under the Hood
To show previews, we need the image, and the relevant content of the page for the particular query, with bounding boxes that we draw on top of the image to show where that content appears on the page. If we used static images, we’d need to make one request for the content and one request for the image; using JSONP with data URIs, we make just one request. Data URIs are limited to 32K on IE8, so we send “slices” that are all under that limit, and then use Javascript to generate the necessary image tags to display them. And even though base64 encoding adds about 33% to the size of the image, our tests showed that gzip-compressed data URIs are comparable in size to the original JPEGs.
