Let’s make the web faster

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
and the
Google Code Blog

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