[thefreeman]

It's extremely common. It is unclear to me if the mousedown event just kicks off preloading of the page, or actually forces you to navigate to the page. If it's the latter, you are breaking decades of mouse ux changing a click from a mousedown followed by mouseup.

[katsura]

+1 I do those as well. Never really thought about how common it could be, but it is pretty natural for me to drag the mouse and let it up somewhere else to prevent incorrect navigation.

[mcintyre1994]

It's the latter - it's in use on all links on their sidebar.

[jtbayly]

Dragging sidebar links worked fine for me all but once in Safari. Not sure how to tell whether it's actually being used, but I don't notice any problems.

[Edit: I was using a blocker that was blocking it. Now I've used it and can tell it's working, and I still don't notice any problems using it in Safari.]

[mcintyre1994]

It doesn’t work in Safari. https://instant.page/tech

> Safari 13.0 has support for <link rel="prefetch"> but it’s disabled by default. Hopefully it will be enabled in September 2020 in Safari 14.0.

Try enabling that setting or using another browser (I used Firefox) to see the effect it has.

[prepromorphism]

+1