From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing
highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We
focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our
research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years,
through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd
like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web
developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.
We are excited
to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the
Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the
web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to
tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full
potential:
Many protocols that power the Internet and the web
were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks
have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as
HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the
community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers
are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like
desktop applications.
In the last decade, we have seen close
to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser
developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance
improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich
and computationally-complex applications.
Many websites can
become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the
entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed
help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest
further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and
optimization that work at the click of a button.
While there
are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still
relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of
broadband to more people, such as the FCC's decision to open up the white spaces
spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing
the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary
goals of our industry.
To find out what Googlers think about making the
web faster, see the video below. If you have ideas on how to speed up the web, please share them with the rest of the community. Let's all work together
to make the web faster!
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations
and Bill Coughran, SVP, Engineering
