Google Shares Insights On Accelerating Web Sites

miller60 writes "The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Google executive Urs Holzle. In his keynote at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on web performance, Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster. He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place, and cited compressing headers as a powerful performance booster. Holzle also noted that Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly."

Comments

First Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

If only Slashdot loaded faster I could have had my first post!

Re:First Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news, Anonymous Coward! - Professor Farnsworth

Ajax Libraries

[0100010001010011]

Now if only every website didn't include 300kb of Javascript libraries that I had to download.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

All modern browsers support caching, and chances are, you aren't actually downloading a brand new set of libraries each time.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[hey]

You can load those libraries from Google.
I assume the don't penalize you for that!

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Korin43]

If you load them from Google, it's far less likely to impact loading times (since your browser will use the same cached script for every site that loads from the same place).

Re:Ajax Libraries

[nappingcracker]

I disagree. Libraries have greatly improved the usability of many websites. I also doubt that many people are pulling down 300kb of libraries every time, since most are minified and gzipped. Even with a ton of bells and whistles it's hard to hit 100kb of .js, The ever popular jQuery + jQuery UI is only ~30kb (with reasonably useful plugins like tabs, dialog, etc, not all the crazy and expensive FX).

I'm OK with users having to pull even 100kb one time to have a nicer browsing experience all around.

I really wish I could get over my paranoia and link to the libraries on google's code CDN. Slim chance, but if they go down and my sites are still up, there be problems!

Re:Ajax Libraries

[socsoc]

So Google's CDN is gonna go down and your site will remain up? Nice idea, stop bogarting whatever you are smoking and pass it along.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer not to, I don't trust google.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[gaspyy]

Frameworks are great but they are also overused.
JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.

To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[nappingcracker]

You're right. Big company services never go down...except those times they did and it was a huge problem. Remember the Amazon S3 outage? EC2 botnet attacks? Google GMail and document services going down? This month Google's jQuery libs on their CDN went down 2-3 times.

Stuff going down for a few hours is a lot of money lost.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Does it support caching of TLS/SSL content? No?

Well, how about just the stylesheets or javascript? Still no?

Well...shit...can't have a secure and fast web.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[micheas]

Frameworks are great but they are also overused.
JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.

To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.

The problem with doing things yourself instead of using a framework for common things like fades is that you have to remember how to code for each of the common browsers. The libraries hide that nastiness from you.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Jesus_666]

On the other hand, Google tends to use amazingly slow servers for some functions. When I decided to edit my hosts file to have www.google-analytics.com point to 0.0.0.0 it shaved a good ten to fifteen seconds off my page loading times because GA had such ridiculously long loading times.

Maybe they've since brought their infrastructure in order and maybe they always hosted their libraries in a more reasonable manner than GA but I'd still be wary of Google-hosted libraries - if the user doesn't have them cached I'd expect them to increase the loading time to epic proportions, making for a horrible first impression.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Yoozer]

stuff that you can easily code yourself.

Yes. The result however, of this DIY script is one script of 5 kb that costs much more work to maintain and does just one thing - collapsing and expanding. 5 of those scripts for 5 operations (let's assume image galleries, a lightbox, some AJAX, form validation and a floating div for a form) would already add up to the size of Mootools*; and they'd only be good for just that one thing.

Writing this in Mootools would take a total of 6 lines or so; but more importantly - the Mootools framework is useful for other things, too. For one thing, it makes your JS far more readable.

Joomla or Drupal are already bloated by themselves because the components need to be wrapped in several layers for customizability; having 2 or 3 JS frameworks fight with eachother is just icing on the cake.

* (replace Mootools with your framework of choice)

Re:Ajax Libraries

[metaconcept]

Does this help?

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> if (!("jQuery" in this)) { document.write('<'+'script type="text/javascript" src="query.min.js"></'+'script>'); } </script>

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't that invalid xml if you don't use < ad > in the string literals? oh, i forgot, the new trend is to not give a shit about easy parseability again

Re:Ajax Libraries

[improfane]

Is your browser cache smart enough to deduplicate between multiple websites?

Website A downloads jQuery
Website B downloads jQuery

The browser has no idea what the file contains except a filename. Since they are on different hosts, how would it know*?

It's not possible for the browser to know which is which. The only way the browser cache would benefit this case if you hotlink from the same domain which is incredibly dangerous (say https://jquery.com/jscript.js)

* One solution is to implement a 'web library standard'. Every library has a accompanying file, something like 'jquery.js.lib'. This is placed on the same server as the hosting website. Inside this file is a hash. If the browser's cache has the same filename with same hash, it can use that :-) Of course it needs a browser change.
 

Re:Ajax Libraries

[hairyfeet]

I'd say if only every website didn't call Google Analytic and a dozen different ad servers spend out all over the planet. For a good way to see how much that crap slows you down, time it once with ABP and NoScript, and one without. When you get rid of all the third party ads and scripts you'll see how much faster the web can be.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[icebraining]

TLS/SSL is a very small part of the web. Emphasis on small.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[l0b0]

jQuery + jQuery UI is only ~30kb

No, it's 272kB minified

Re:Ajax Libraries

[icebraining]

There's already a HTTP header called "Content-MD5". It's designed for error correction, but it could very well be used by caching mechanisms: send an HTTP HEAD, get the md5, compare against the local cache database to see if there are any hits.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[delinear]

There's always a trade-off between fast and secure anyway, if you're encrypted all of your traffic, even to your favourite social networking or news sites, just on principal, you're probably aware of and happy with the trade off - for the less paranoid, caching can help a lot, and so can Google's project to host common libraries.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[delinear]

It also establishes a common method of implementing things - within an environment with more than one developer, it saves a lot of time if you're all building using the same framework rather than having to work out the nuances of each other's bespoke code all the time. For little throwaway projects the time saved in doing clever UI work and in maintenance thereafter in using a framework is massive. For bigger projects the gains are less, but as you mentioned, still worth it for creating a level browser playing field.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[dave420]

Google hosts jQuery on their CDN, available for use in a script tag (or inclusion via Google's own JS library) which is not incredibly dangerous. Lots of sites use it, which means all the sites that do don't require the library being re-downloaded.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

> * One solution is to implement a 'web library standard'. Every library has a accompanying file, something like 'jquery.js.lib'. This is placed on the same server as the hosting website. Inside this file is a hash. If the browser's cache has the same filename with same hash, it can use that :-)

Potentially a great idea, but I see a new class of XSS attacks surfacing here.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[imakemusic]

Even better, use the Net tab in Firebug which breaks it down and shows you how long each component takes to lookup, request and receive.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[abbylucy]

http://www.voguetouch.com/ Sports, mainly by the advanced sports equipment. Do you have enough good equipment? Of the world's most famous brands. Only two brands, jordans Nike. If you want to have these two brands of equipment, and want to use the lowest price to buy, Then I suggest you go to: http://www.voguetouch.com/ More and more fashionable style. More favorable, the more you want. ugg CLASIC $80 NHL Jersey$40 NFL Jersey$35 NBA Jersey$34 MLB Jersey$35 Handbag $36 jordan air max oakland raiders $38 Christan Audigier BIKINI JACKET $58 gstar coogi evisu true jeans $39 coach chanel gucci LV handbags $36 coogi DG edhardy gucci t-shirts $18 CA edhardy vests.paul smith shoes $40 jordan dunk af1 max gucci shoes $39 http://www.voguetouch.com/

Re:Ajax Libraries

[clone53421]

Clever enough, but using MD5 is still running the slight risk of collisions... of course if you verify that the content-length is the same size too, you’re reducing the risk of collision substantially.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[clone53421]

Easily parseable for you, perhaps, but if you actually ran that code using &lt; and &gt; in the string literal it would print literal < and > characters as text... not a script tag as it was supposed to.

Perhaps you were confusing it with HTML entities inside a string literal contained in an attribute of a tag, which do need to be escaped? E.g. <option value="&lt;Choose&hellip;&gt;">&lt;Choose&hellip;&gt;</option>

Re:Ajax Libraries

[BiggoronSword]

In addition to caching, using these libraries reduces the amount of code required to perform a task, which in turn results in smaller file sizes and faster loading.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[cynyr]

100KB at 4KB/sec = 25 seconds. Yes lots of the US still has dial up, you load a 100KB JS lib + 200KB of flash ads + 300KB of real content at 4KB/sec, you are looking at 600KB/(4KB/sec) you are talking 2.5 minutes(150 seconds) to load your page, so they can click the link they really want, and then move on. no I hove no issue with sites like flicker have a huge picture, thats what they are about, or youtube needing bandwidth, but WTF does "MY RANDOMS BALG KJEHUEHUEHEUIH SITE OF AWESOME" need to be 600k per load?

Re:Ajax Libraries

[clone53421]

The cached JS file would, of course, be run as if it was from the requested domain, not the domain it was originally downloaded from (that would likely screw up badly by triggering all sorts of cross-domain scripting protections... you’d get a bunch of JS errors and the thing wouldn’t run). As the two JS files themselves are bytewise identical, I see no possibility of XSS attacks.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Gulthek]

If it's a "randoms balg site of awesome" then I don't think anyone going to it is there for a fast page load. They either care about the crappy content enough to wait or will be gone in less than a second anyway.

Also, if they're on dialup I'm sure they're using Opera with its Turbo feature and image management to compress or eliminate all that crap.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[nappingcracker]

~272kB is with EVERY jQueryUI plugin, which few sane people would ever need. That is also a non-gzipped figure.

Using your example with all the bells and whistles, both (jQuery + jQueryUI) total only ~73kB gzipped.

jQuery 1.4.2 itself weighs in at ~24kB gzipped, and with just a few plugins enabled, jQueryUI is much smaller.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[nappingcracker]

Yes, that is the best solution, fall back to local if the CDN fails.

Re:Ajax Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

lol mega ignorance paraded so proudly, i 3 /.

Noscript

[iYk6]

That's what noscript is for. With noscript, your browser doesn't even download the .js files.

Re:Noscript

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

That's what noscript is for. With noscript, your browser doesn't even download the .js files.

That's fine and dandy. IF.

If you don't care to see or experience the vast majority of web sites on the Intertubes today.

Honestly, when I see (yet another) pious elitist bleating about no-script or whatever, I wonder: Why don't you just surf in Lynx?

If you're surfing with no-script, you're missing 75% of the Internet. If it's not the 75% you want to see and or experience, than good for you. But bleating about the creative uses of JavaScript on the World Wide Web is old news.

Re:Noscript

[Dylan16807]

75%? When I turn off javascript it only seems to affect about a tenth of the sites I visit.

Re:Noscript

[Jurily]

If you're surfing with no-script, you're missing 75% of the Internet.

Actually, it's more like 95%. However, you did completely miss the point. Turning off Noscript for a site you choose to bless takes two mouse clicks and a reload.

You're not missing out on what you want to see. You're missing out on all the other random shit you couldn't care less about.

Re:Noscript

[calmofthestorm]

Likewise. And if I see flash it's a damn good indication I just don't care what's on the site.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Or if you actually want to be able to use your [credit card/bank/net provider] site. The problem isn't what we, the users, allow or deny--the problem is the hubris of the programmers and web designers who want to stuff in all that bloatware, just because they can.

Dear Web Site Designer:

If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, your customer has moved on.

If your search algorithm brings up even more pages when another term is added, your customer won't slog through the cruft

If the pages is flashing and singing and offering 50 different subjects in 20 colours, your customer is confused and will not select anything.

If your customer has to fight to find what they want and pay for it, they will go to a brick and mortar.

If your reader wants to share a link or open it in another tab, finding out it is a script that can only be opened where it was found is annoying and likely to gain you some hostility.

If there is any effort in reading and understanding what you published, they don't care how pertinent your subject is or how true your opinion.

Oooo . . . shiiiinnnny does not a good web page make.

Re:Noscript

[Pentium100]

I have noscript on and yes, it affects a lot of sites, but if I want, I can always enable the scripts for a particular site, but it sill helps not having them on by default.

Re:Noscript

[EvanED]

A tenth? What Internet are you using?

My my estimation based on the scroll bar position after counting for a while, I've got about 250 websites listed with site-specific preferences; some of those will just have plugins enabled so I can look at PDFs, but most are to enable JavaScript.

They range from a couple dozen sites that I want to watch some Flash video on (enabling plugins but leaving JS off doesn't seem to work) to online stores (NewEgg and Best Buy both need JS for nearly essential features) to two of my banks (one of which doesn't actually need it I think, but it adds a few neat features; the other I think needs it) to some discussion-centric sites (even /. by default, but also things like Blogspot if you want to add comments) to the social networking sites to sites like this.

I can't say for certain what percentage of the sites I visit I have whitelisted, but rarely does a day go by when I don't discover some new site to add.

Re:Noscript

[jochem_m]

You're mostly missing a lot of slow loading, badly designed pages. You can turn it off selectively when you need to you know.

Re:Noscript

[rtfa-troll]

It's true that javascript is crucial to the web. However, good and important javascript is limited to a handful of sites. What you should do is take a liberal approach at the beginning and e.g. immediately turn on the whole of google.com and the other top ten whole domains that you use regularly. Next, if you find yourself allowing a site a second time, you do it long term. Finally; learn a few alternative sites that are less script dependent. The worst ones are ones which make you use javascript for menus or for content access. This normally means that they have some really nasty advertising (overlay frames with flash or something) which relies on javascript.

Once you have a you will actually find that your browsing experience is better with noscript than without it. You will very occasionally temporarily allow a site and that costs you a second or so, but most of the time you will just not see the various annoyances which take up so much time when web browsing normally.

Comparing browsing with noscript to browsing with lynx really shows you have never tried it properly. Maybe it's not for everybody, and people with no understanding of what a URL is or a server name / DNS name might have difficulties with the interface to start with; however for anyone with either a slight technical knowledge or under the age of 50, browsing with noscript is going to be better than browsing without it. The important thing to know is that you won't achieve this in your first five minutes of noscript.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. What point are you trying to make by avoiding Flash and Javascript? It seems so arbitrary and pointless...

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize noscript allows you to enable javascript for certain domains in two clicks, right?

Re:Noscript

[EvanED]

Just to drive this point home, it's less an hour and a half later, I haven't been browsing the internet, and I've already found a new site that I needed to enable JavaScript for.

Re:Noscript

[ArsenneLupin]

And if I see flash it's a damn good indication I just don't care what's on the site.

Except for games...

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey well looky here, we have 2 gramps in our midst.

For that, not only am i going to stand on your lawn, i'm going to rip out grass in the shape of a stencil of goatse.

Re:Noscript

[somersault]

. You will very occasionally temporarily allow a site and that costs you a second or so

Or spend a few minutes filling in a form then wondering why it doesn't submit or realise that some dropdown isn't populating etc. This is especially annoying on secure payment forms, which may have elements from a couple of other websites being blocked even if you've already enabled scripting on the main site. I don't like reloading forms that may charge me again, or having to go and restart the data entry process when I find out that the payment confirmation uses Javascript..

I just use adblock to block ads, I'm fine with everything else.

Re:Noscript

[Hurricane78]

Exactly. I also turn off pictures, CSS and that pointless HTML rendering. What’s the reason for that anyway?
I just miss out on all that random shit that I couldn’t care less about. :P

Re:Noscript

[Dylan16807]

News links off of slashdot, forums, imageboards, wikis, none of these need javascript. I have it on for youtube, even if I don't understand why it's needed to load flash, mail, newegg, and gmane.org. Probably a couple more, but very few out of the total of sites I visit. Saves me a lot of memory, and there are a few sites where javascript actually hurts the experience to take into account.

Re:Noscript

[imakemusic]

e.g. immediately turn on the whole of google.com

But not google analytics... I'm tired of waiting for google to analyse my visit before the rest of the page is allowed to load.

Re:Noscript

[drinkypoo]

You're not missing out on what you want to see. You're missing out on all the other random shit you couldn't care less about.

Blocking stuff has taught me that there are some sites I just want to avoid. When I load a site and it not only requires Javascript to work when it's not using any dynamic features, and tries to dump scripts and cookies from a dozen known spammers on me, then I know I really don't need to view that content. Who cares if it was interesting? It's not THAT interesting.

Re:Noscript

[TheKidWho]

If there is any effort in reading and understanding what you published, they don't care how pertinent your subject is or how true your opinion.

Perfect advice, you should follow it!

Re:Noscript

[EvanED]

News links off of slashdot, forums, imageboards, wikis, none of these need javascript.

News links off of slashdot don't, but with what I get when I'm not signed in, reading comments I think does. Some things in many forums need JavasSript -- spoiler tags for instance, or Fark's quote button. (Sure, you don't need to have that last feature, but it's so useful I'd question your sanity if you regularly participated in discussion there and didn't use it.) On Flickr (not really an imageboard, but still), JavaScript enables a far more usable uploader at least. Dpreview uses a dropdown menu for navigation; without the onselect event, the only way to go to a specific page is by changing the URL or hitting prev/next a bunch.

Re:Noscript

[Kozz]

Likewise. And if I see flash it's a damn good indication I just don't care what's on the site.

Oh, yeah? I'll see your smug and raise you a get off my lawn.

Re:Noscript

[precariousgray]

Your comment prompted me to scroll to the top of this page.

Oh, look, a Flash advertisement.

Re:Noscript

[treeves]

Hang around a while longer. Eventually you'll get a checkbox giving you the option not to see ads on /.

Re:Noscript

[calmofthestorm]

Interesting; I didn't see that because of noscript and adblock.

Re:Noscript

[precariousgray]

In which case you may wish to revise your previous comment as follows: "And if I see flash it's a damn good indication noscript and/or adblock are broken."

Re:Noscript

[precariousgray]

You mean the one at the top-right corner of the page that says "Disable Advertising" that I haven't checked because the advertisements on this web site aren't overly annoying or obtrusive?

I'm more bothered by the PARTY LIKE IT'S 1989 layout on this web site that consistently breaks whenever I attempt to expand/collapse comments, or even do something so simple as post response.

Re:Noscript

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Exactly. I also turn off pictures, CSS and that pointless HTML rendering. What's the reason for that anyway? I just miss out on all that random shit that I couldn't care less about. :P

So, again, rather than strutt around with your balls all oiled up and your ass in the air, why not just browse with Lynx? Or is that not "leet" enough for you?

Re:Noscript

[lpq]

You are so full of it...

You turn on NoScript for your casual browsing. Sites that you want to let display, you put them in the permission list. Just that simple. Then you get the web the way you want it. Also -- you can tailor out facebook scripts which many websites include by default these days.

Is it my imagination, -- but I tried Chrome the other day and noticed no 'noscript' option. It had adblock, but didn't seem to have a way to control scripting. Could your annoyance with the noscript comment be that Chrome doesn't have this? Or did I just miss something?

Re:Noscript

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yeah, "falmebait", sure, whatever. But you know it's true: All these "power users" who can't stand JS or whatever and want the Internet to be like it was in 1996... Sure.

Re:Noscript

[RockDoctor]

Right direction, wrong decade.

Hope they don't get to trigger happy

[cameljockey91]

How many times will their crawler check a slowly loading website before they penalizes it?

I prefer low-tech solutions...

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

I find my browsing goes faster if I just yell at my housemate to stop downloading torrents that are *ahem* 'Barely Legal'.

Re:I prefer low-tech solutions...

[dintech]

If you haven't already, get a router with QoS. Next, when he's in some other room 'maximising his bandwidth', set his max connections to 30 and his upload to 1/4 of your upload speed. You might also consider Tomato or DD-WRT if you have a compaitible router.

Re:I prefer low-tech solutions...

[Hurricane78]

That’s what traffic shaper scripts for your firewall are for.
I’ve done my own, and I still get perfect ping and priority for surfing/im/ssh etc.

java sites screwed

[codepunk]

"Holzle also noted that Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly"

If it is server response time the java sites are screwed.

What the hell I have karma to burn.

Re:java sites screwed

[kainosnous]

This really begs the question of what it tries to load. If it simply loads the html, then JavaScript laden sites and Flash sites will have the edge over simple information sites that serve dynamic content. However, if they load all referenced content, then the reverse may be true.

I would like it if the latter were true. What could be better than every Flash site being seen as a large bundle of data that simply displays "This site requires Flash". When I surf the web, I surf for content, not pretty pictures. In my opinion, if a site can't simultaniously be surfed in Lynx, read in Braille, and parsed with a spider, then it really isn't a web site.

Re:java sites screwed

[grahamsz]

There's no inherent reason that Java should be slow. I run a discussion site (linked in my sig) that's running off an all-java codebase, and while it has occasional load issues. We can render the content for the front page of the site in 20 ms or less (it's at the bottom of the page if you are curious). Java has a proper application model, so with smart use of singletons you can effectively keep the entire working set of a forum site in memory. Our performance is much poorer if you start browsing through archives, but that makes up a tiny percentage of our page views.

Re:java sites screwed

[Nadaka]

java really really only has problems with startup time (that a web spider will never see) and the delay when a servlet|jsp is hit the first time. While doing web development, we see that startup and first load most of the time, giving an appearance of slowness, but it is much better on a production server with regular traffic.

Re:java sites screwed

[bruno.fatia]

I'm guessing you dont like Flickr much..

Re:java sites screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, if a site can't simultaniously be surfed in Lynx, read in Braille, and parsed with a spider, then it really isn't a web site.

You sound fat

Re:java sites screwed

[glwtta]

Right, because how could Java possibly hope to compete with the blazing speeds of PHP and Ruby?

Re:java sites screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're so "l33t."

I don't know what point you're making, but at least you're making it as hard as you can...

Re:java sites screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

Servers response is as instant with Java as everything else is. The "slow" part with Java is on the client-end most of the time.
Same goes for Flash and Silverlight.

But it doesn't matter anyway since Google doesn't bother with any of them. Unless it is HTML, CSS, JS, XML or general text files (PHP and other plaintext files too), the crawler doesn't care.

Re:java sites screwed

[thetoadwarrior]

I write all my PHP on one line and use one letter variable / method names so it parses faster. You can't really do that with Java with it's long names and type declarations.

Re:java sites screwed

[maraist]

I can only hope you were being sarcastic. variable names are least parser intensive operation. Though for non lexically scoped variables (at least in perl, which I though PHP was at least loosely based on), the variable names are hash-lookups, thus long variable names have a minute incremental cost - especially in tight loops.

That aside, this isn't a rational comparison, given that php is a scripted language and java is a compiled language. So your 50 character java variable name is a 4 byte integer symbol reference at load time and execution time.

That being said, java .class files (even in version 6) are pretty startup intensive the first time. And .jsp files are doublly so, because they are compiled into java source, then compiled into .class, then finally loaded. It'll only win over a PHP compile if it's

But high-performance pages are likely raw servlets and thus pre-loaded prior to startup.. Meaning before accepting port 8080. Thus in a clustered environment with rolling updates, you never see the startup slowness. The only remaining startup slowness would be pre-jitted code (running raw interpreted-mode for the first 100 executions or so). But by run 1,000 you're likely running bare-metal assembly - depending on the nature of the servlet that is. Granted, this doesn't compensate for overly abstracted code (many of the MVC frameworks) or inefficient cluster/database code.

Anyone Notice

[codepunk]

Anyone notice how slow the "How Where Making the web faster page" is loading?

google-analytics.com ?

[corsec67]

I saw my browser waiting on google-analytics.com quite often before I started using No-Script.

Why do sites put up with an AD server/analytics service that slows down a site by a large amount?

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a common misconception that it will improve google search ranking

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's valuable data, and google is the only game in town. You can see which keywords are converting, and for what dollar amount, and which keywords are money pits. Yes, it will on occasion hang but you should look at the data that it produces before saying it's not worth it.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[NoPantsJim]

Isn't this sort of mitigated when people put Google Analytics at the bottom of the page? I've never noticed any slowdowns waiting on GA on any of my sites, and I have GA scripts at the bottom of every page. The absolute bottom.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noooo! you are doing it all wrong, it must be the 1st thing to load, so that google gets their results 1st and user experience is enhanced by that.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have google-analytics blocked by no-script and in my hosts file. Makes things so much faster and prevents the great Satan from knowing what I do!

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[NoPantsJim]

I suspect people who actually think like this are the reason GA gets a bad reputation.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me: I added an adblock rule for google analytics the other day when /. temporarily broke the "more" part of the comment system.

I thought maybe the javascript for the more feature was getting blocked, so I opened the adblock tab. Nothing looked out of place, so I tested with adblock disabled just to make sure. However, the one good thing that came out of it: I noticed google analytics so I blocked it.

Upshot: My page loads feel faster on every site now. Good fucking riddance, google analytics.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I run adblock, noscript, flashblock, betterprivacy, yslow... and...I run all of that stuff at work too.

Despite that, the website I run--*runs* analytics. Even though it's slow. Oh yeah--that slowness...it's often DNS. No clue why--I'd think that server farm would stay cached everywhere on the planet. The deal is--if your browser hangs on that load--somebody wrote the page wrong. My analytics urchin--except on the blog (damned wordpress) always runs at the end, after content's done rendering.

Smart webmasters understand that their webpage is not a single document that just suddenly appears.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a rare breed--as these days I have trouble getting interns or programmers who understand even the basics like minification, modgzip, or who are even comfortable setting cache headers.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Spikeles]

Googles' own documents recommend that you should use asynchronous tracking which should cause no page slowdowns, and even if you use the traditional code it should be at the at the end just before the closing body tag.

If a page is loading slowly because of google-analytics, blame the web site developer.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

For this reason, I just embed the analytics code inline at the bottom of each page. As my pages are served compressed, this increases page size only fractionally, so from the user's point of view is well worth it.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[ArsenneLupin]

If you have any body onload scripts, then they will wait for the entire page to load... including google analytics that are at the very bottom.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[dintech]

Yes, it will on occasion hang but you should look at the data that it produces before saying it's not worth it.

Not worth it to who? It's not worth it to me. Noscript please.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites that hang with that didn't implement it right...

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[onza1]

You could just use Chrome + "Google Analytics disqualification"
This plugin communicates with JavaScript code (ga.js) from Google Analytics to indicate that information on the web site visit is not sent to Google Analytics.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Hurricane78]

google-analytics? That’s what Adblock is for. :)

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[garcia]

It's worth it to me. That's how I afford to post the content to the website which "you" consume information from.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, GA has been pretty shoddy in the past. They even recently released an asynchronous version of their code recently to mitigate this. Of course people who knew what they were doing were already dealing with this issue years ago by appending the code to the DOM after the important page data had loaded, but that doesn't excuse the poor performance and poor information on Google's behalf.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Monchanger]

But it is worth it, if it serves to make the sites you use better.

I know people like to be short-sighted, selfish and need instant gratification, but there are good reasons to turn off Noscript in some places even when it's not directly and immediately helping you.

Even when talking about a site you visit being able to gain other visitors, that's important if you have any interest in that site growing.

Think big picture.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an asynchronous version of the tracking script available, but some people are slow to update.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the same argument for adblock not being used in order to support the revenue of sites. If the site owners were more responsible about how they use invasive techniques, then we wouldn't need to run it. It's chicken and egg I think.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[IamTheRealMike]

There was a bug in Firefox for a long time (think it's fixed now? not sure) that didn't correctly update the status bar, so it would say it was waiting on Analytics when it actually wasn't. The Google Analytics servers are really fast. This story is about how Google is investing in making the web as fast as possible - if Analytics was really a common cause of slowdown, don't you think it'd get fixed?

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[thetoadwarrior]

As long as it's at the bottom of the page it doesn't really affect you too much and they'll do it because it's a very quick and cheap solution to obtaining loads of good data.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[nicklott]

Yeah, but that async code has only existed for a couple of months. Until recently analytics code was the bottleneck on most sites, making it a bit rich for google to be claiming to have sped up the internet.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Spikeles]

6 months

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[nicklott]

The irony is that with noscript enabled you simply don't exist for 95% of sites (log crunching is SO 1999). You might think that you like it that way but it's extremely shortsighted: you can hardly expect people to develop content that appeals to you if they don't know you exist.

How fast?

[tpstigers]

Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. My initial response was a happy one, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to be unnecessarily discriminating against those who are too far away from the bleeding edge. Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough? And where are we drawing the line between 'fast' and 'slow'?

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

> And where are we drawing the line between 'fast' and 'slow'?
4.9 seconds and / or 320KB - over or under ... clock / measure it!

Re:How fast?

[javaguy]

Where are "we" drawing the line? We're not. Google is. It'd be nice if they told us where the line is, but I can't see that happening any time soon, since Google is pretty much a black box (though it is a pretty, shiny black box).

Re:How fast?

[mentil]

Furthermore, what if the server resides in some far corner of the planet, and Google is testing the speed from SoCal? The speed GOOG gets will not always resemble what someone else (potentially across the ocean) will get, unless they test at every major node of the internet.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the people behind Google were smart enough to consider this?

Re:How fast?

[noahbagels]

While yours is a well thought out comment, from dealing extensively with web site latency for multiple sites, "bleeding edge" is often slower than "simple" or "old". As others have pointed out, it's the 300kb of javascript from 10 different social widget and ad sites that slow down the page. Most research on this topic today emphasizes client-side latency, as in the code and structure of what your browser downloads and in what sequence. Client side latency generally consumes > 90% of the user visible latency. After all, light and packets can travel half-way around the world in just 60 milliseconds, yet this is talking about penalizing sites taking over 4 seconds to load. TL; DR; You won't have to upgrade or buy lightning fast hosting. Just don't bloat down your page with dozens of third party js or tens/hundreds of poorly compressed images and you'll be fine!

Re:How fast?

[calmofthestorm]

Cue lack of net neutrality and this becomes a nasty can of censorship worms.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not fair because sites that are chock full of information are slower loading. We get penalized because we have large pages full of images and info, but spam sites that are almost completely without info and have a couple of stock photos have smaller pages.

This is bad for the web.

Re:How fast?

[incubuz1980]

It is better than discriminating based on the webserver software, like MSN was doing:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/26/1228227

Re:How fast?

[Wierdy1024]

Yes, we should penalize them.

Imagine there are two sites with the information I need. I would much prefer to see the faster site than the slower one, because by loading the faster site I get my information faster.

If I wanted my information slowly, I would walk to the library...

Re:How fast?

[XCondE]

Dude, stop whinging. You don't even know what kind of weight that metric receives - actually none of us do. Given two pages with the same relevance (as far as the computer can tell) give me the faster one. Didn't work? no worries, I'll try the other next.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

But they're not checking it themselves; they're sending out a spider that crawls all over the web -- when it actually hits that site, it'll probably be coming from a nearby site!

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough?

Yes. In fact, I usually cancel loading a site if it takes more than a few seconds, as I can find the same information elsewhere.

Re:How fast?

[delinear]

We only have their word for it that this even enters into the ranking at all. Maybe they just wanted a faster web so they claim this affects ranking and wait for all the SEO companies to disseminate. The next request may say your site will rank better if you host a video of your CEO wearing a tutu and doing a silly little dance, then they just sit back and wait for nature to take its course...

Re:How fast?

[delinear]

You could always use text and then have thumbnails linked to the bigger images. Your site will not only load and rank better, but users who don't want to download 5MB of jpegs when they only came for a snippet of textual information aren't penalised either.

Re:How fast?

[rwv]

Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly.

Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough?

I, for one, like the idea that sites without dozens of scripts, bloated images, and advertising cruft will get higher ranks. This will give my own personal site a small boost in the Google rankings. And I feel it's well-deserved. Power to the people who aren't out there trying to make money from page views.

Re:How fast?

[sorak]

Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. My initial response was a happy one, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to be unnecessarily discriminating against those who are too far away from the bleeding edge. Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough? And where are we drawing the line between 'fast' and 'slow'?

I disagree. Please sign my petition to have all first post comments modded "+5 insightful" :)

Re:How fast?

[vlueboy]

Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough?

In hindsight, this particular penalty was only a matter of time. Browsers hit the mythical 100% score and decided speed was the next mythical benchmark.

The speed issue is the newest in a string of issues like
+ RAM is cheap! We aint optimizing our product. Just max out your RAM to play our game.
+ Get a better videocard, noob!
+ Buy a new motherboard! You need it so you can upgrade BUY a new [compatible] CPU so you can get the PCI-e videocard above, because plain PCI is uncool. Eventually we're all told we don't have "enough" of the old hardware resource or performance to be supported or that even if it's reliable and fast.

In a few years as IE/FF/Chrome get closer in stats, we'll have businesses returning to the fragmented 1990's saying "This site is best viewed with..."

Moore's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to discount how important it is to make your website as fast as possible but...

I doubt anyone with a decent internet connection is complaining about these 320k pages. Even on a cell phone it's not a big deal. As technology moves forward and speed improves even more these size related complaints will get less and less important.

Think about it - who complains about a 340k file on their hard drive anymore. I'm sure in the mid '80s lots of geeks rightfully griped about it.

Re:Moore's Law

[delinear]

Page size seems to be much less relevant than load time. I could put up a 50k page that takes an age to load if it calls in a bunch of scripts on crappy third party ad servers. Similarly I could have a 500k page which uses compression, coding best practices (so the content is delivered before it tries to load in enhancements), good use of caching etc and will give a much more streamlined experience.

Re:Moore's Law

[professorguy]

I have the absolutely best internet connection possible in my location. A 320k page will load in 97 seconds. That's a long time to wait.

As technology moves forward and speed improves even more...

OK, I hit 26.4kbps speed in 1997. It is now 13 years later and technology has moved forward. My current speed? 26.4kbps. So it's just possible technology moving forward will NOT compensate for larding your page with shit.

Re:Moore's Law

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. I also wonder what the effect of database-driven design is: a lot of website load everything and generate all HTML dynamically from databases, frequently on different servers. That's got to be a lot slower than static HTML.

Penalty for speed

[csmanoj]

That would make google search results bad right. When I search I want the site with the best information. Not the one that loads fastest.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

And the most reputable/best sites will not be filled with crappy flash adverts and affiliate marketing crapola.

I think that's what this is aimed at. Remember it's not the only factor, so a slow site, but one that's really popular/reputable will be high up, but a unpopular site, peppered with keywords and flash/javascript advertising shite will rank low.

I'm pretty sure the google search engineers have thought of this (and many other issues) when designing it. I'm fairly certain that they didn't just stick on a "if(size>200kB){rank-=10}"

Re:Penalty for speed

[sound vision]

I'd hope that their algorithm is heavily weighted towards accuracy versus speed. Given that Google seems to know what they're doing most of the time, the speed of a site is probably only important enough to move it up or down a few places within a page of search results. I can't remember the last time I had to click past the first page of a Google result, anyway. Of course, there's no way to tell just how much it matters, since they keep the inner workings of PageRank secret.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know their algorithm, but I'd imagine the speed penalty is only a small part of the overall ranking. If the site with the best info loads very slowly, it's info-rate should help balance out the speed-rate.

Re:Penalty for speed

[cbhacking]

The ironic thing from my perspective is that Google's own services (ads and analytics) are among the worst offenders for making web pages slow down, in my experience...

Re:Penalty for speed

[dintech]

The web has always been slow. Anyone who remembers the Netscape days will atest to that.

Re:Penalty for speed

[eggled]

Also, some sites will load slowly because of google-analytics. Are they going to be penalized by Google, or will they be considered "faster" than other sites that aren't "enhanced" by Google services? So, a site that takes 6 seconds to load, with 4 seconds waiting on google-analytics is slower to a user who's not blocking google-analytics than a site that takes 3 seconds to load. Google will probably compare the 2 second time to the 3 seconds, and rank the Google customer site higher than the faster third party.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a penalty, not an outright ban. Think of it as -2 points out of 100. There are still a lot of other criteria that are as important or more.

The reality is that it's really hard for system of computers to read your mind and build a search engine that provides what you think is the best information. I would bet my salary that there is a statistically significant correlation between sites with bad information and sites that do a pitiful job of keeping their speed up.

Also, notice that they talk about a penalty for very slow sites, but not a reward for very fast sites. I'm sure Google has found that sites with the best information tend to be more in the medium speed range. Those sites are good enough that people are willing to put up with a little slowness; the sites prioritize their information slightly higher than their speed.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - their ads don't form part of their index!!
Google needs to speed up their ad network to whatever level they expect webmasters to write fast loading pages to.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed isn't the ONLY factor - but it is a user-experience factor.

Assuming 2 sites with similar content, and all other factors being equal, except site one loads twice as fast - it is good for users to have the faster site ranked higher.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Civil_Disobedient]

Seconded! Penalizing slow sites only promotes those shitty mirror sites that all seem to be on fast pipes.

It's interesting: I've started noticing these spam sites creeping higher and higher up the page rank and was wondering what new trick the ad-spammers had developed to game Google. It would just figure that it turns out to be Google shooting themselves in the foot with asinine policies like this.

Re:Penalty for speed

[JustinOpinion]

When I search I want the site with the best information. Not the one that loads fastest.

Think of it another way: all things being equal, which would you prefer: a site that loads quickly, or one that loads slowly? Users overall much prefer sites that load quickly. Google knows this because they can see people's searching habits. As far as an end-user is concerned, load times are part of the metric of which sites are better than others.

That would make google search results bad right.

Only if you assume that the Google ranking metric should be "relevance of data in page" irrespective any other factors. But for the vast majority of users that really isn't the case. Take another example: how should Google rank a page that has useful content but is also serving up malware via browser vulnerabilities? Most users would agree that blocking it (effectively ranking it very low) is the right choice.

Of course, even though load times are a factor in web experience, the question becomes "What is the right weighting because content relevance and load times?" And here again it is naive to say that the "most relevant" content should be in the #1 slot. To give a contrived example, consider:
-Site A has 100% of the content you want; takes 60 seconds to load
-Site B has 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load
-Site C has the other 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load

Google could rank A first, but if they rank B and C in slots #1 and #2, then users can actually get all the information they want in a shorter amount of time. The "content per unit time" has been maximized rather than the "content in first search result". Which sorting algorithm is "best" of course will vary from person to person. Google is probably optimizing in an attempt to satisfy the greatest number of users; and is no doubt using the vast amounts of search-behavior data they have in order to optimize.

So, really, I think taking load time into account is fair. The purpose is not to have sites sorted by accuracy per se; rather it is to give users the tools they need so that they can quickly (and pleasingly) get at the content they want.

Re:Penalty for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is this isn't a user-experience issue. This is about accuracy of search results, which is polluted by factoring in things that have nothing to do with relevancy. A page that loads faster isn't any more relevant and shouldn't core better than a more relevant page that loads more slowly.

These "user experience" people ruin everything. Charlatans.

Thugs and Vandals

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has jumped the shark.

This is only going to discriminate in favour of sites with money behind them. Like stock investment we're seeing Google cranking up the race to buy a big fuck off server and locate it as close to a hub as possible. In an age where information is power the likes of Murdoch et al are just going to get an edge and leave everyone else who may have better content at a disadvantage.

"Compassionate Conservatism." "We're all in this together." "Do no Evil."

This all has the familiar ring of the right wing thug who punches your face in while smiling at the same time.

Re:Thugs and Vandals

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably what's coming is the suggestion everyone should just host at Google because it'll be fastest hosted there. Fastest for Google at least.

If avg page is 320 KB, a header is a drop n bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

If the average page is 320 KB, a page header is a drop in the bucket. HTTP headers may be 100 or at most 200 bytes. Sounds like a blow hard to me, at least with the header nonsense.

NONONONONO

[Magic5Ball]

"He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place"

The core Internet protocol and infrastructure was and remains a conduit of innovation /because/ it is agnostic to HTTP and all other protocols. Optimizing for one small subset of its protocols and for a single kind of contemporary usage would discourage all kinds of innovation using protocols we've not conceived yet, and would be the single largest setback the modern Internet has seen.

Most delay is ad-related.

[Animats]

Most real-world page load delay today seems to be associated with advertising. Merely loading the initial content usually isn't too bad, although "content-management systems" can make it much worse, as overloaded databases struggle to "customize" the content. "Web 2.0" wasn't a win; pulling in all those big CSS and JavaScript libraries doesn't help load times.

We do some measurement in this area, as SiteTruth reads through sites trying to find a street address on each site rated. We never read more than 21 pages from a site, and for most sites, we can find a street address within 45 seconds, following links likely to lead to contact information. Only a few percent of sites go over 45 seconds for all those pages. Excessively slow sites tried recently include "directserv.org" (a link farm full of ads), "www.w3.org" (embarrassing), and "religioustolerance.org" (an underfunded nonprofit). We're not loading images, ads, Javascript, or CSS; that's pure page load delay. It's not that much of a problem, and we're seeing less of it than we did two years ago.

And how is speed relevant to the content?

[RonVNX]

This is just a pointless degradation of the search results. Google needs to stop screwing around with the accuracy of their results like this or they too will find themselves displaced by a competitor that focuses on relevancy of the content and not irrelevant outside factors.

For the unbearably slow, there's always Google Cache.

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chances are Google made the decision because slow loading sites caused a negative response among testers. I doubt Google is differentiating between 0.5 and 1 second, but I have no problem believing that users didn't like getting search results that took 8+ seconds to load. I may not agree with their priority but I can understand why Google would account for this.

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed is relevant because crap mirror sites should be ranked lower than the originating site. [Or even vice versa, faster mirrors should be preferred over the original source]

You seem to be under the delusion that Google is just going to delete slow sites, or return results purely on speed regardless of content. I have no idea what could lead you to think this way (well, I do "knee jerk reaction") because as far as I can tell, the most relevant site will be preferred but if there are multiple sites that are approximately all around the same relevance, the faster one is preferred.

Sounds like an excellent idea to me, lord knows that I've been pissed off waiting 45 seconds for a page to load when the next result loads instantly with similar information.

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the search results are slow, the fault lies with Google, not the sites returned.

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[delinear]

I wouldn't mind a big filter button that said "rank faster sites higher", but defaulting this behaviour into the results does seem like it would skew ranking in favour of big corporations with lots of money to throw behind caching solutions, which seems like it would affect the relevancy of a lot of searches (dumping you on a corporate site trying to sell you products when you're trying to do academic research). I hope this isn't another step away from search relevancy.

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[delinear]

Then you need to learn how tabs work - fire up the first five search results in tabs if you like, and then open the tab of whichever loads first while the others load in the background. Unless you always expect to get the exact information you want on the very first page you open, you'll find in the long run it's a faster approach (and more reliable than expecting Google to deal with the problem for you).

Re:And how is speed relevant to the content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a pretty stupid idea to me. Dunno what might lead you to think this way (well, I do "Jerk") but if you want to have irrelevant things factored into your search results, Bing has a nice shiny search engine you'll probably like much better than Google anyway.

Flash ...

[Midnight Thunder]

For Flash heavy sites, will the time it takes for the Flash to load be taken into account? Or how about sites slowed down by all the external ads?

Re:Flash ...

[cynyr]

i hope slow ads impact the sites rating, as for flash load time, meh either way.

Re:Ajax Libraries/Bulky Pages/User-Agent Dependant

[Anonymous Coward]

How about sites that, using javascript, for menus have so much stuff that the front page for them is 200K?
Example: Benton County, WA
Or store their state in a hidden form element on the page?
(On the comment on user agent: 200K using "Mozilla/5.0 Firefox/3.5.4", 17K using "Mozilla/4.0", 31K using standard Wget user agent)
Good: Changing page based on user agent(links2 actually can navigate a non-javascripted version, Firefox requires javascript to go anywhere). Bad: HUGE. If I was on a dial up, it would be about 90 seconds for that page. And that is the one page, not any extras like pictures or included scripts. AND they have Cache-Control set to "private" so a web proxy for the office doesn't give any benefit to anyone else.
And every other page is under "pview.aspx?id=...."
Another Bad: Depending on the user agent it changes. What do you suppose happens when the Google Robot comes by compared to a normal user?...
Did I ever mention that I hate the new web site for my county compared to the old one? (Old: Mostly static pages, much slimmer)
(And most of the current site content is static on a day-to-day basis it seems.)

srsly

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad might be overstating the problem, but absolutely less accurate than they could be. We can only hope they realize the error of their ways, but don't be surprised if this is merely the beginning of tweaks to their algorithm that have a negative effect on accuracy of results to advance some interest of Google's.

what about the other browsers?

[SuperBanana]

Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster.

Bull. Back when IE and Firefox's last major releases came out, Chrome was a tiny drop in the bucket market-share-wise. January was the first time it passed Safari in marketshare. I think it's more accurate to say that competition in general has led to companies improving their browsers. I'd bet we could also attribute the performance improvements to better standards compliance by websites, since there are now so many mainstream browsers.

I'd say that Firefox vs IE competition (and Firefox vs Safari on the mac) have inspired the improvements...

Re:what about the other browsers?

[imakemusic]

I sort of agree. The general competition has definitely lead to improvement all round but I seem to remember Chrome's main selling point when it was released was its speed (previously Opera's forte) which lead to the other browsers improving their speed. Firefox's was security, stability and customisability which has lead to improvements in Internet Explorer's. And Internet Explorer has...erm...lead to people paying greater attention to web standards as everyone slowly realises how shitty it is when a browser doesn't support them.

Re:what about the other browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you're missing the point of the text you quoted. Chrome, regardless of total market share, represents competition - especially if its market share increases at all. So the powers-that-be behind IE and Firefox see a new competitor that has a lot of face in the IT world, if not a lot of adoption, that blows their browsers out of the water in speed and they are "encouraged" to innovate more in that area.

Re:what about the other browsers?

[somenickname]

I'm not so sure. Chromes claim to fame is fast Javascript. I imagine that many, many people didn't even know they *wanted* fast Javascript until Chrome claimed they had it. If a browser is 5x as fast as the competition for something that people need, the competition takes notice.

Re:what about the other browsers?

[thetoadwarrior]

Chrome's only real claim to fame is speed. Even now no browser can touch it but you can almost guarantee they are trying. Chrome's market share may not be the biggest but then again neither was the market share for IE or Firefox in their beginnings and Chrome has the backing of one of the biggest companies. It only makes sense for everyone else to be concerned about improving their speed.

Re:what about the other browsers?

[tamird]

Google Chrome did for standards-compliance what Pamela Anderson did for breast implants. Even TODAY Firefox and IE do not pass acid3.

Re:what about the other browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's pushing an agenda, probably good for Google Inc, almost certainly bad for us. They seem to be focusing their attention on all the wrong things these days.

Measuring speed from *where* exactly?

[buro9]

Where are the measuring *from*?

I've moved a site from Linode New Jersey to Linode London, UK because the target audience are in London ( http://www.lfgss.com/ ).

However in Google Webmaster Tools the page load time increased, suggesting that the measurements are being calculated from US datacentres, even though for the target audience the speed increased and page load time decreased.

I would like to see Google use the geographic target preference and to have the nearest datacentre to the target be the one that performs the measurement... or better still to have both a local and remote datacentre perform every measurement and then find a weighted time between them that might reflect real-world usage.

Otherwise if I'm being sent the message that I am being penalised for not hosting close to a Google datacentre from where the measurements are calculated, then I will end up moving there in spite of the fact that this isn't the right thing for my users.

Re:Measuring speed from *where* exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the docs:

"Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature."

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=158541&hl=en

Re:Measuring speed from *where* exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some advanced stuff you're saying you want to see from google. I doubt it occurred to them - they're new at this whole interwebs thing.

Re:Measuring speed from *where* exactly?

[Any Web Loco]

w00t - my favourite forum gets a mention on /.!

Re:Measuring speed from *where* exactly?

[El Tonerino]

The Google Webmaster Tools has a page speed metric. It is measured from people who have the Google toolbar installed and have flipped a switch somewhere. Your speed it measured on an average of these folks. There is a measure of accuracy (low, medium or high) depending on the number of points of data it has collected.
There is also the time the crawler spent downloading pages in milliseconds.

Who know which one of these they use (or combination there of.

time standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I met the guy who invented pull down windows. In the '60s he had his students run simulations of what PC's should be like in the future. Any request that takes longer than 2 seconds will be uncomfortable to the user.

The opening comment here sez pages are closer to 5 seconds now, which means the web is a lose.

After an hour or more of click-wait-abort and getting no work done it's tempting to give up on computers entirely. Especially when I recall how very fast it was in the '80's using stuff like VUI

I always tell folks they should have one page of text and a handful of graphics totaling maybe 30k.

Sorry I'm not on here often, maybe I'll go post on some old "google groups" next.

Nils K. Hammer

Re:time standard

[clone53421]

Any request that takes longer than 2 seconds will be uncomfortable to the user.

The opening comment here sez pages are closer to 5 seconds now, which means the web is a lose.

Not necessarily. Enough content should be rendered nearly immediately that the user is not discomforted by the wait, even though parts of the page are still loading. Now, granted that whether or not the page is responsive at that time is another question... if part of the page has rendered but it wasn’t the part I need, and the page won’t scroll for ~5 seconds as it loads, then yes, that is inconvenient.

Net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Once net neutrality is gone, sites that aren't run by media conglomerates controlling the fast pipes will also lose search rank for being slow.

Lane change.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Google executive Urs Holzle.

So does that mean we don't need broadband?

That's not insightful

[Per Abrahamsen]

Noscript doesn't turn off Javascript. Most browsers already have an option for that. What Noscript does is to make the control of Javascript (and Flash) much more fine grained and convenient.

Some typical case:

1. Scripts on poor web sites just serve to detract from the content. Those you simply never turn on.

2. Scripts on good web sites improve access to content. Those sites you enable permanently first time you visit (press no Noscript button in the lower right corner, and select "enable permanently") and forget about it.

3. Some web sites contain a mix of the two. Here you can either explicitly enable a specific object (by clicking on a placeholder, like with flashblock), or temporarily enable scripts for that site.

Basically, Noscript makes more, not less, of the web accessible. The good web sites you use normally will not be affected (as they all will be allowed to run scripts). But following links from social web sites like /. become a much more pleasant experience.

Of course, most of the noise scripts distacting from content are ads, so AdBlock gives you much of the same benefit. But I don't want to hide ads, as that is how the sites pay their bills.

Re:That's not insightful

[mxh83]

I really was fine with Noscript as a concept, but there are three very serious flaws I find:

    1. Noscript cannot be turned off completely unless the extension is disabled. Even if you allow all scripts globally it still filters some stuff. That's a huge annoyance when I just need to open a site fast, that I need to disable and restart

    2. Noscript doesn't have ready made reliable whitelists. e.g. something that blocks all web analytics and harmful scripts, and allows all else.

    3. An easy way to enable multiple scripts selectively together.

Re:That's not insightful

[Gulthek]

1. Citation needed.

2. Do you have any idea how complicated and gigantic a JavaScript whitelist would be? Also a bad idea as folks would just migrate to pulling javascript from whitelisted domains.

3. [could not parse] Do you mean that "allow all for this page" or "allow all for this domain" doesn't do what you want?

Re:That's not insightful

[mxh83]

1. If you use it you'd know

2. Something like Adblock's definitions (Easylist etc), for Noscript would work well but it would need to be maintained. This, in my opinion is one of the main reasons why noscript hasn't become popular. People need an effective starting point after installing noscript.

3. Not really; the key word there being "selectively". Something like a checkbox control might work better. There are many sites with 10-15 scripts and managing these becomes a bitch with so many clicks

Correction:If avg page is 320 KB, headers use 30%

[thijsh]

Yeah, but that 320Kb is most likely divided over at least 30 HTML/CSS/JS/JPG/PNG/SWF files... And headers include lots of information including cookies being sent back-and-forth, so the average headers are closer to 1000 bytes (around 500 both ways) per request now. According to my count this is around 30Kb, or an overhead of 10%, so this does leave some room for improvement... But if you account for the fact that those 320Kb will most likely also be transmitted with gzip compression the bytes over the wire are closer to 100Kb (roughly), so this brings the header-overhead on the wire to a whopping 30%. Those headers can be compressed with standard gzip to bring it back down to around 8Kb, but when you would take advantage of compression with a predefined dictionary optimized for HTTP headers you could shave it down a lot more, at least well under the 30% overhead we currently waste.

I hope Google will kickstart this initiative by adding it to Google Chrome and contributing code to HTTP servers, this way Chrome will be even faster than competition and other browsers will have to keep up... I love it when competition works!

250 websites is not the vast majority

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of web sites on the Intertubes today don't need javascript

Re:Nostyle

[cryptoluddite]

Also knock it up a notch with View -> Page Style -> No Style.

This works really well for sites that put stories into tiny columns or use unreadable fonts.

Average 320KB per page?

[IBBoard]

I'll have to double-check my sites to be sure, but I think I'd be throwing a huge optimisation at any of my pages that got near 320KB, never mind averaging that large. That's just crazy-huge for a page given the amount of actual useful content that most pages have. If only people put in useful stuff instead of filling sites with pointless cruft.

Re:Average 320KB per page?

[thijsh]

This Slashdot page is 300Kb now... You seem to be forgetting that pages aren't just white with black text only. There is a lot of media being loaded, and 320Kb is only a little if you think about it. A large JPEG alone can be bigger, and multiple on one page will easily put a page in the megabyte range (i'm looking at you Bing).

Re:Average 320KB per page?

[imakemusic]

This page is now nearly 400KB and that's just the HTML.

Re:Average 320KB per page?

[thijsh]

Yeah, it's a moving target... Given that is isn't the longest thread i've seen by far I think it's safe to infer that there are Slashdot pages that easily exceed 1 megabyte. That's broadband for you, making long rants and flamewars possible since 1999... :-D

Re:Average 320KB per page?

[IBBoard]

But a /. page has loads of comments and probably a horrendous amount of HTML for each. If you're talking about an average page rather than an unpaged discussion then 300KB+ should be a lot harder to reach.

As for additional images, I was taking that into account. What's wrong with sub-100KB for all the media on a page? Unless you've got a photo gallery then more than that seems like overkill. That said, I have seen a rise in blog posts that include arbitrary tangentially related images purely for the sake of it, because the author thinks it'd be "cool" and because it pads the post out. They probably once heard that a picture is worth 1000 words, but didn't take into account that they were adding 1000 words of drivel.

Re:Average 320KB per page?

[thijsh]

If we were that cheap with out bandwidth we would have lighting fast internet, but pretty simple boring websites nowhere near the rich media experience we have today. And presentation is everything for most sites, you can even put a monetary value on the 'wasted' bandwidth and check the ROI, i'm pretty sure the extra people you reach are well worth it. You can always surf with CSS/JS/Images etc. disabled, and well designed sites will fall back to the fast experience while retaining all information in a good-enough presentation. But I like the nice designs, and would not sacrifice a rich experience to save a couple Kb.

Example: Mozilla know the value of a good presentation (and you can bet they blow a *lot* of money on bandwidth so they put their money where their heart is). They have one of the only open source project sites that doesn't look like 1995 HTML... and they reach more people trough this informative rich site. But they waste over 300Kb listing their projects, and waste almost 500Kb showcasing Firefox... is that worth it? Fuck yeah!!!

accelerate?

[kkirk]

javascript,http and tcp is now bleeding for years now..
...javascript/etc is slow because of it's design it often mades my computers run like they were 10 year old crap fighting with ecc errors and io errors behind the scenes...this is not web 2.0, this is web 0.2
...http is designed to download web-page, not to solve a cryptic javascript initiated download puzzle i don't really think anyone should save it - it should be replaced for good
so...to speed up the headers should be altered - and compress them? outcome: smaller required bandwidth footprint ... but nowadays links are getting faster, if this was enough in the last few years it will suffice till the burrial of http

I feel happier with NoScript

[improfane]

I think Lynx is the wrong example to use, as it does not have Javascript.

Run Internet Explorer for a few days. Go to the sites you go to now currently and see how unresponsive they are:

Enjoy the flash adverts sucking up your CPU.
Enjoy the diet and belly fat banners
Enjoy the and accordion and menu animations
Enjoy the Google Analytics loading
Enjoy the updating banner ads
Enjoy loading Prototype/jQuery/Google Ads again and again for every site you go to
Enjoy vibrant media in-text adverts.
Enjoy some of the sneaky popunders and fake virus warnings
I recommend the no-Javascript experience to anyone.

Load up with RequestPolicy, NoScript and AdBlocker Plus and you're sorted for hiding the crap you don't want to see. The AdBlocker is a way to block the stuff you accidentally let through with RequestPolicy.

As to the content producers, say escapist magazine, screw them. They obviously forgot about me when accepting that cheque from selling out. You don't block or try counter adblockers. It's my computer, my bandwidth.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[Eivind Eklund]

You don't block or try counter adblockers. It's my computer, my bandwidth.

You're asking their computer to do work to transfer over their bandwidth, accessing information that they spent money on preparing, where the payment they ask for is displaying ads along the content.

It is certainly possible to sincerely argue that pirating this material is morally acceptable, using similar arguments as with other forms of piracy where the requested payment is different. However, when you're making their computer do stuff using their bandwidth in violation of their wishes, it is disingenuous to use the argument "it is my computer and bandwidth and it should be used after my wishes".

Eivind.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[somersault]

As to the content producers [..] screw them. [..] It's my computer, my bandwidth.

That's the most childish thing I've read this week.

It's also their bandwidth, and their content (which you seem to be getting some use out of).

You have a right to try to block their ads, and they have a right to try to get around that (as long as they aren't actually infecting your machine with malware to do this). If they can't get their ads seen, they won't make money and soon there will be no content for you to mooch.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[improfane]

If anything, I'm *saving them* bandwidth.

I will never click on of their adverts, so why should I see it?

I'd hazard a guess that they cost me more in CPU usage than it ever does them. It costs me MORE than I get for the content.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[improfane]

This is a key misunderstanding: SHOWING an advert does NOT mean money for the web site.

This is a logical fallacy of the content producers. Simply showing me an advert does not translate to an instant income. I have to actually click it. It's like the cosmetic companies saying using their products will make you feel better after 2 weeks. Of course they're going to say that! It makes them cash.

The only time I have EVER clicked an advert is to give a site owner money, which is against the advertisers ToS and rather unscrupulous to begin with.

I donate to the websites that deserve it, like EFF.org

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[somersault]

I know it doesn't mean more money for the site, but it definitely means more chance of clicking one (even if this is only 0.01%, it's better than 0%). I'm against ads on principal, but I think I did actually click one the other day when I was on a machine without an adblocker.

Donating is good, and I would happily pay for services to get them ad-free, though with web pages that's pretty much a moot point when you have adblock enabled!

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[delinear]

Wait, they put up a sign welcoming the whole world to come into their house, and then you're saying it's their moral right to then complain if you don't look at the ads on the walls of their house as payment? There was no contract or agreement in place prior to my entering their house, just an open invitation - if this is a pre-requisite they should display at the very least a click through agreement that this is the understanding. I say this as someone who doesn't disable ads (because I do support a free web and for me it's easy to just ignore ads, I mentally filter them out and if the site gets some benefit by my not physically filtering them out, all power to them), but unless you're making it part of an explicit contract that you will only allow free views in exchange for enabling ads you have no right to complain when someone follows a link to your site with adblock/noscript enabled. If you don't like it, don't accept incoming links, set up a login system and enforce a policy that accounts will be deleted if ads are disabled - then sit back and enjoy your very quiet life on the web...

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[icebraining]

Actually, you're saving the ad network's bandwidth, not the site's, usually.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[delinear]

Actually you're dead wrong, because ads don't just track click-throughs, they can also track impressions. If I visit a site with an ad for product X, and then two days later I go buy product X, there is a model which will see the original site owner rewarded, even though there was a disjoint between me seeing the ad and buying the product. The amount will likely be much less than a direct click-through-purchase model, but nevertheless it recognises the cumulative effect of having seen the ad in a few places before deciding to purchase.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[dave420]

It's people using AdBlock that cause sites to have annoying adverts in the first place. Site owners are simply trying to recoup the cost of bandwidth by serving ads. If you turn off the adverts, then they don't get any money. If a site's adverts annoy you, just don't go to the site. It's not just your bandwidth, it's the site's bandwidth. It's very selfish to ignore that. But I'm sure you'll post back with some pithy response about how it's up to you, and blah-blah-blah flash CPU blah blah.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[dave420]

Then don't visit the fucking site. They *want* you to use their ad server's bandwidth, as that gets them money. What is so hard to understand about this? Oh yeah, it makes you look like a selfish bastard. Your "guess" isn't worth shit - it's a bullshit argument without any basis in reality.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[dave420]

Why would you assume that they don't care about ads being served? Why would they have them if they didn't serve a purpose (pardon the pun)? Yes, sites rarely (if ever) have text saying you must have adverts served, but it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out they are there for a reason.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[dave420]

No, it depends on the site's advertising model. Lots of sites get paid for simply showing an advert. In fact, you can't tell the difference from just visiting the site. You clearly have no idea. There's a surprise.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[cynyr]

I'd love to do that but so many sites have ads with sound, or that cause flash to consume 50% of one core... 2300+X2(65W)

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[clone53421]

It's people using AdBlock that cause sites to have annoying adverts in the first place.

That is simply false. In fact, reality is exactly the opposite: It’s the sites having annoying adverts that cause people to use AdBlock in the first place.

Annoying advertisements (particularly annoying, the blinking animated gif ones) have been around at least since when I was first starting to surf the web back in the days of Netscape Navigator 2. AdBlock was pretty much unheard of back then, which meant I had no choice but to look at Flash ads for fungal foot cremes on my Hotmail account.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[Fjandr]

You should load it because the adview provides the revenue for the sites you use. If you think they are paid per click, you know nothing about web advertising. They're paid per impression, and if everyone blocks the ads, free sites go away.

If a site is unusable, fine. Blocking everything just because you can means you're either ignorant or selfish.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's a positive feedback cycle.

Look at youtube nowadays. It's absurd how many different ways they advertise to you, and many of them can't really be blocked without also blocking youtube's core functionality. Enormous banner ads and sidebar ads are blockable; the obnoxious in-video popups and occasional unskippable pre-roll ads are a bit more complicated. Google has managed to turn youtube into an unholy merger of geocities/angelfire and myspace. This from a company noted for its unobtrusive text advertisements.

You can avoid all of these with the right tricks, but that's the point that's being made. Like the way that wolves preying on deer make the deer stronger through natural selection, so too do advertisers and ad-blockers propel each other into an ever increasing spiral.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how the posts here are modded backwards. The people who know what they're talking about get modded down, and the person who has no clue about how internet advertising works gets modded insightful. Some days I despair at the flourishing of the ignorant.

Re:I feel happier with NoScript

[clone53421]

You can avoid all of these with the right tricks

EasyList for Adblock Plus must know some of those tricks, then, because I haven’t noticed those.

Why not block ads if you don't click?

[improfane]

If you're not going to be clicking adverts, I am sure it costs nobody money. It just costs them bandwidth. The adworld is mostly CPC/PPC.

Content websites seem to think that if I do not block an advert, I will actually click it. That is ridiculous!

My principle is that advertising is like a bribe, they paid to put it in my face. That is a product I have no interest in. I will learn about products when I have a need for them.

Re:Why not block ads if you don't click?

[Fjandr]

Most advertising revenue is paid per adview, not per click. There may be additional revenue per click, but that is not the primary payment source.

Re:Why not block ads if you don't click?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply wrong. Especially with bigger sites, they get paid for ad impressions (people who've seen the ad), and it works well. Click-through is just a bonus. If you see the ad, the brand is in your head, you'll remember it, it'll stick out to you when you're choosing between it and the competition.
Ads work, I just hate everything that marketing stands for, and use a quick and dirty DNS server to block them.

Re:Correction:If avg page is 320 KB, headers use 3

[grmoc]

They are attempting to add it to Chromium and get it into HTTP servers.

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy

There is a link to the code somewhere there. If not, just search the chromium repo as that is where it lives.

It is open and you can play with it too. There is also an Apache mod for it, I believe, though I haven't searched for that lately.
More numbers and studies are available there.

disclosure: I'm one of the SPDY authors

Interpretation of "Load too slowly"

[olau]

I was thinking about this, but it might just be a penalty if your page loads really slow, say more than 10 seconds.

Google is still full of semi-dead links, when you click one, it takes forever to fetch the page - and half the time it never loads and the other half it doesn't load fully (so you get to see the ads, but not the content).

Another trick we used:

[Hurricane78]

Pack all design (not content) pictures in one big picture, and use cropping to use the parts in the right places. Saves you separate requests and hence HTTP headers and establishing separate TCP connections.
Also shorten all your links. A server-site script can handle the en- and decoding. (But beware that this stops Google from matching keywords against the URLs.)
Much can also be done subjectively. Like never having elements with unknown heights hold up the rendering of elements below them. Always specify the sizes of external elements like pictures, objects/embeds, etc.
Also, if you want to go further, re-order the elements on your site in such a way, that they can be rendered in the order in which people start looking at them. Start at the center, then work to the upper left, render the menu and title, and then grow from there. Anything below the fold should be loaded and rendered last.
Also, by adding >script> tags in the <body> at the right place, you can time your JS execution to the right moments in rendering, and so optimize load.

But of course the best strategy still is: Don‘t make your freakin’ website so freakin’ big! Of course this has gotten bigger. I remember that our starting page law was to stay below 100kB back in 2004. I find it horrible that some sites take 500kB or even 1MB to load, even when all the standard site elements (design pic, CSS, JS) have already loaded.

Re:Another trick we used:

[Hurricane78]

There are at least 3 errors in my post. If you find them, you win 1,000,000 Internets! ;)

Re:Another trick we used:

[Anonymous Coward]

Pack all design (not content) pictures in one big picture, and use cropping to use the parts in the right places.

Is there any kind of client performance issue if, for instance, I end up with a 500k image and I then call that image into the page 50 or 60 times to build up every single component of the page (navigation button styles, hover styles, etc)? Genuine question, I don't know if the browser throws away the cropped part of the image so its manipulating tiny images, or if it's doing manipulation with massive images (and I know when doing simple JQuery scrolling of large images in Firefox I get all kinds of slow down issues which I think are related to dealing with moving so many large images at once).

Google Searching

[helix2301]

This is just another example of how Google is so far a head in the search market. I give them credit they are always trying make there product better.

It does not give them cash

[improfane]

It doesn't give them money Dave, if I do not click an advert (click) and do not buy the product referenced in the advert (impression)...

They get nothing.

Are you a content producer by any chance?

Re:It does not give them cash

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful?

Your lack of knowledge of terminology means you clearly have little experience in adspace.

Click is as you say
Impression is a view of the _banner_, not the product page.

A huge number of sites and ad networks operate on CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) - Google is one of the few PPC companies, as it's so easy to defraud that purchasers find it hard to trust small operators. CPM is much more transparent as both sides can see the metric (site owner using Analytics/logstats, AdServer counts the impressions of the remote hosted ad).

Once you hit a certain volume, people will happily pay CPM to advertise as it's the old 'eyeballs' concept.

But. You're right in that if you use adblock, so you never even download the banner, you won't be counted as an impression, so the content producer will not be paid for their work.

(p.s. I'm not dave420 :-) - I'm AC at work)

Re:It does not give them cash

[dave420]

Score: +5, Totally-fucking-wrong.

An 'impression' is when an advert is served, not clicked on ('click through'), or turned into a purchase ('conversion' not 'impression', as you incorrectly stated). You are so sure you know everything, are being smart, and not hurting anyone, but you are quite the opposite - clearly ignorant, certain you are correct, and hurting sites whose content you want to see.

I'm not a content producer, just a person with a modicum of understanding of how the web works, and how selfish, ignorant attitudes like yours are hurting the web.

If you're immune to adverts

[improfane]

Adverts pay for hosting.

Adverts ONLY pay for hosting if me, the surfer:

• Clicks an advert
• Buys a product referenced in the advert or visits the site in the future

Otherwise they get nothing. I should know, I have £80 in my adsense account and nobody clicked my adverts and I had 80,000 impressions.

It makes NO difference if you show me an advert or not, I WILL NOT buy it or follow it. I immediately mistrust it. They had to pay to get it in my face. I would rather wait for word of mouth or a review.

Does that make sense now?

Showing me adverts is a lost cause, so it makes more sense for me to block them. Content producers have not lost anything by me not clicking their advert. They would have got nothing from me seeing their advert to begin with. It affects nobody but myself.

You could say they wasted bandwidth on me but that's bollocks. They lose bandwidth on everyone who visits the site but does not click on it.

Everyone wins.

Re:Correction:If avg page is 320 KB, headers use 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Google already proposed a protocol called SPDY which compresses headers. However, rolling it out for wide deployment will be tricky because of all the proxies in the net.

a simple answer to speeding up websites

[whitroth]

All final tests, from the developers on out, should be done on two generation old computers, and those *have* to be connected to the outside via non-commercially rated broadband. Then we'll stop seeing pages with multiple megabyte pictures, and megabytes of friggin' flash videos*, and bloated java apps.

                    mark

* Flash videos on *corporate* web pages while you're trying to use *their* search for *their* available jobs!

HOW ABOUT FASTER (and SAFER) from 1 file ONLY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Per my subject-line above, & your quote below next? I'll give you an INSTANT SOLUTION for faster webpages, & a more secure one as well from a SINGLE FILE you already have in your Operating System called a HOSTS file (with evidence thereof):

"I'm not sure how I feel about this." - by tpstigers (1075021) on Thursday June 24, @12:46AM (#32673814)

Then, take a read below, & I am sure you'll feel better once you are aware of this (in regards to something you ALREADY HAVE that can make you go faster AND SAFER in the same pass from 1 single file only (The HOSTS file)):

---

RESURRECTING THE KILLFILE:

(by Mr. Oliver Day)

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/491

PERTINENT EXCERPTS/QUOTES:

"The host file on my day-to-day laptop is now over 16,000 lines long. Accessing the Internet particularly browsing the Web is actually faster now."

"From what I have seen in my research, major efforts to share lists of unwanted hosts began gaining serious momentum earlier this decade. The most popular appear to have started as a means to block advertising and as a way to avoid being tracked by sites that use cookies to gather data on the user across Web properties. More recently, projects like Spybot Search and Destroy offer lists of known malicious servers to add a layer of defense against trojans and other forms of malware."

---

Additionally: So do the folks @ MVPS.ORG, BlueTack/BISS, & other sites that are dedicated to use of a HOSTS file, as well as myself, & those who use "Spybot Search & Destroy" also (because it populates a HOSTS file vs. known bad sites &/or servers too), & also there is this "pertinent quote" from a user who tests it for me as well & his results:

"the use of the hosts file has worked for me in many ways. for one it stops ad banners, it helps speed up your computer as well. if you need more proof i am writing to you on a 400 hertz computer and i run with ease. i do not get 200++ viruses and spy ware a month as i use to. now i am lucky if i get 1 or 2 viruses a month. if you want my opinion if you stick to what APK says in his article about securing your computer then you will be safe and should not get any viruses or spy ware, but if you do get hit with viruses and spy ware then it will your own fault. keep up the good fight APK." - Kings Joker, user of my security guide @ THE PLANET http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?s=80bbbffc22d358de6b01b8450d596746&showtopic=89123&st=60&start=60

---

HOSTS FILES ARE ADBLOCK'S SUPERIOR ON SEVERAL GROUNDS (& in combination/together? Pretty much the best "browser level" security, in "layered security fashion" you can do currently)!

----

1.) HOSTS files eat A LOT LESS CPU cycles than browser addons do no less (since browser addons have to parse each HTML page & tag content in them)!

2.) HOSTS files are also NOT severely LIMITED TO 1 BROWSER FAMILY ONLY... browser addons, are. HOSTS files cover & protect (for security) and speed up (all apps that are webbound) any app you have that goes to the internet (specifically the web).

3.) HOSTS files allow you to bypass DNS Server requests logs (via hardcoding your favorite sites into them to avoid not only the TIME taken roundtrip to an external DNS server, but also for avoiding those logs OR a DNS server that has been compromised (see Dan Kaminsky online, on that note)).

4.) HOSTS files will allow you to get to sites you like, via hardcoding your favs into a HOSTS file, FAR faster than DNS servers can by FAR (by saving the roundtrip inquiry time to a DNS server & back to you).

5.) HOSTS files also allow you to not worry about a DNS server being compromised, or downed (if either occurs,