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 the HTML5
protocol. 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!
