Google has always been about speed. From its highly streamlined homepage to vast server farms, the company goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of your search queries are returned in a fraction of a second. Now, it wants the whole web to be that fast.
In a video posted to the company’s official blog, a number top Google engineers and evangelists outline Google’s goal: to make surfing the web as instantaneous as “flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine”. It’s a lofty goal to be sure, but given the accomplishments we’ve seen in the last 15 years, it certainly seems attainable. Now for the matter of actually getting there.
To help achieve that goal, Google has unveiled a new Speed section of Google Code. The site includes a variety of tutorials and tech talks aimed to help developers optimize their code, with articles including “How gzip compression works” and “Optimizing JavaScript code. There’s also a selection of Tools from both Google and many third parties.
So what are the biggest problems remaining? In the site’s FAQ, Google outlines a few of the biggest issues:
Bandwidth is only one factor that contributes to latency. There are several other factors such as:
- Websites that do not follow best practices in web development and are unnecessary slow
- Web servers are often not optimized for speed
- Several internet protocols were designed 10/15 years ago, when websites and web applications were different
- Browsers only recently started focusing on speed. Many Internet users are using slow browsers
- We believe we all need to work together as a community to address all the factors that keep the internet slow.
Google makes it clear that this isn’t a problem it can solve on its own. In the video below, Google Senior VP Engineering Bill Coughran describes the movement as “a series of difficult advocacy steps, over a long period of time”. But it’s worth it. As Performance Evangelist Steve Souders says as he closes out the video, “what we should also hold out as a goal, as an aspiration for what we can achieve by making the Internet a faster place, is raising the quality of life around the world.”
Photo by michaelmcd
if you want to speed up a good portion of the web…
get rid of 3rd party web ads…
waiting on ads is an unruly burden fo ra good deal of websites…
additionally, most websites using widgets have no real interest (knowledge) of how quickly/slowly these things load..
If there were no ads, you wouldn’t be reading this article right now. Think before you type something stupid.
i see…
igor you ignorant f*k, if you want to speod up the web, and a good portion of the sites.. the load time of the ads far exceed the material time for the content of the site to load.
if you were able to comprehend what’’s going on when a site is loaded, we might have a conversation.
the fact that you’re too poor to be able to pay for reading something isn’t my issue..
god, there needs to be a twit filter to not see you msgs.. do you ever have anything intelligent to add to a conversation..
Now if you guys have settled after your little fight, timy11, want to explain why Igor is wrong? His fist sentence that is.
Igor could have been a little bit nicer about his reply.
But then again timy11 could have not risen to the bait on that one.
At the end of the day though, great content on the web wouldn’t exist without advertising – that’s a fact. The more we support those (like Techcrunch) that creat great content, the better the web gets as a source of reference.
There is, of course, Wikipedia which is funded by donations, but timy11’s comment “the fact that you’re too poor to be able to pay for reading something isn’t my issue” isn’t helpful at all.
timy11 – there are actually other people out there (in the third world for example) who can’t afford to pay for content. They need to be educated and have access to the same learning tools – great content – as we do.
Interesting point.
@timy11
Third party ads are among the last page elements that firefox renders. I can’t speak of other browsers, but I know that when I load a page like this one in firefox, as I did a few seconds ago, I am able to read all of the non-embedded/non-third-party content long before firefox renders content served up from third-party machines. Guess what we really need, then, is a more precise definition of “slowness” if we want to say that third party ads contribute to the “slowness of the web” becuase the portions of content that I care about load no slower when they are accompanied by other embedded content — it is just that embedded content that is slow to load.
hey #znice…
the ability/sequence of loading of content, or 3rd party ads/widgets is a function of the server/server-side apps and how it serves out the ’stuff’ that your browser gets.
the problem that you have, is that the site you’re reading doesn’t really have an incentive (skill/etc..) to really be able to continually measure the speed at which the reader/browser will recieve the complete end page (ie the content, and the 3rd party stuff).
in fact, the time to download, could vary greatly for different users depending on where on the net the browser/user is located.
this was the prinicple problem that akamai was created to resolve. but it never was meant to deal with all of the different widgets that are out there, coming from small companies, that are being accessed/delivered by other small websites as well.. to be blunt, it’s a mess…!
but as far as the ad driven network/thesis, i’m of the opinion that more and more people/sites are starting to realize that ads aren’t doing it. that if you’re trying to create content, because you want to wrap ads around it to support your lifestyle, then ads aren’t bringing in the bacon.
i have no “one size fits all” solution for how to allow content to be developed/displayed to the masses.. actually i do.. if you want to create content, create it.. don’t expect to be paid for it.. oh wait.. who the hell really wants to do that!!!
you could always produce content that a solid/devoted group would want to read, and get them to pay for it..
oh, wait.. that means you’d actually have to have compelling content, and then you’d have to more or less sell it.. and selling is damn hard.
don’t get me wrong. i’m not against ads/3rd party widgets.. for me, i simply block 95% of them.. and never see them.. but i still have to go through the time of processing them, and removing them from the data stream that i see..
so in conclusion, if google really wants to ’speed’ up the time to load issue, resolve this issue..
You should check out the YSlow Firefox addon, it can help identify reasons why you site is slow
We’ve used YSlow to speed up our site considerably, but it tends to be pretty stupid sometimes. A coworker recently ran it on the site, and then opened a ticket suggesting that we add Etags (we have them), Last-modified (we have them), Expires headers (we have them), and so on.
I looked over his results, and closed the ticket with a ‘we’ve done all of this last year and YSlow is junk’. Google’s Page Speed seems to do what YSlow does, but better and more intelligently.
I cant browse without adblock – without it would be like driving without brakes – you just have to have it – after sometime u just get addicted – and you cant experience web with ads anymore..
I agree with timy11. Slow loading of my blogs results from slow ads and really slow widgets. The few web pages where I use widgets suffer the same problem. Web pages without widgets but just with Google ads load fast.
By far the worst offender is widgets. I can understand if loading some photo thumbnails from Flickr takes a few moments but I do not understand why a simple widget loading a VERY simple and short XML file containing a little bit of text through Feedburner takes so long. It’s so slow that often the widget itself gives up and fails with an error. Maybe Feedburner’s cache is slow? I don’t know. But those widgets load much slower than a widget that has to load 20 photo thumbnails from Flickr. It’s crazy.
Hi Jason,
Google always trying to improve and make things better for its users. I am sure that users will definitely appreciate and welcome this change.
Thanks for a great post.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
Certainly ambitious, but any resource that helps to make the development community smarter and websites and services faster is welcome. Google’s contribution to the community certainly helps to keep their image in a very positive frame (and to rally the troops to support their agendas in terms of mobile, desktop browser and web apps)
Long story short: Ir’s a very welcome initiative!
Completed correct Peter. They are managing their image well. Gotta impress those users, investors, partners, employees. Gotta keep that cash cow running. Just look at the income statement.
We are here to provide FOR YOU
.
Every notice when you give to them, you pay more. But when they pay out, they pay 1 cent CPC. Part of the game.
How about a compromise in theory? Obviously third-party ads are an integral part of the overall web model, but at the same time, they are ridiculously slow most of the time and could clearly be optimized if it was a priority.
Have you ever navigated to a site and it was taking forever to load, and in the status bar of the browser it says something like – “waiting for adclick.adservingservice.com” It’s infuriating.
Why do the ads have to load first? Why is the entire page hijacked by the fact that the ad-server is responding slowly…
I think it’s pretty clear that this is a problem.
I believe ONLY Google dare to say”But it’s worth it.” to accelerate the SPEED with bandwidth increasing unlimited in order to improve the EXPERIENCE.
I want to share you guys the view “Model Calculation: Why the CPM of Online Video Ads is around 100RMB” from http://youping.cn/archives/222, you will have fun with THAT CALCULATION. Check it out.
Holy shit the guy with glasses in the video LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE JEFF GOLDBLUM.
I had to read his name to find out it wasnt JG.
Lofty goal.
Indeed Google speeds and accuracy is the factor behind its success in search industry but it has to maintain this due to increase volumes of searches by automated softwares and proxies.
I donot know how much is google impacting the green house effect but their single search release fair amount of carbondioxide in the atomsphere.
they must have taken a trip to south korea recently where internet speeds are 100x’s faster. they are light years ahead of the US in just about every service that you can imagine.
Yup its true Google had been very pacey since its start and that really drive people to gmail, search engine and other stuff. So i hope this ‘ll also remain successful and best luck for google.
http://code.goo.../community.html is broken ..
http://code.google.com/speed/ is also giving 404
can google give a stats on what approx %age of websites are slow according to their definition of slow ?
its working fine now ..
The PHP tips are pretty much wrong…
I really wonder how google could post such nonense.
http://groups.g...fbe82dd80408cc#
Um…. instead of messing around with TCP, why don’t they take a look at SCTP? It solves a load of problems inherent with TCP that are hard to solve with tinkering and its optimised for reliable transfer of multiple streams of data. Is this a case of Not Invented Here?
“Several internet protocols were designed 10/15 years ago, when websites and web applications were different”
Try 30 years…