Page Weight Matters

I'm on a pretty fast line, and I am sometimes appalled with how long it takes pages to load, and often it comes down to loading content I have no interest in: * comments * ads and images * headers * sidebars * toolbars * menus * social network tools * meebo bars (really google, really?) * javascript to load all of the above crap The amazing thing is how often I can't even begin to read the page for…

When I joined Google in 2009, we were on the tail-end of a latency optimization kick that Larry had started in 2007. At the time, we had a budget of 20K gzipped for the entire search results page. I remember working on the visual redesign of 2010, where we had increased the page weight from 16K to 19K and there was much handwringing at the higher levels about how we were going to blow our entire latency budget on one…

I'm a bit pessimistic about this now, and largely given up beating the drum Even in industries where customers are on extremely bad connections [0], I couldn't convince people to give up their bloated component libraries or cache things in indexedDB. Fact is not many web developers know how to write for these environments and not many businesses will incentivize for it, even when their customers complain. Though the optimist in me will say this - if anyone actually does…

The web has become a three-class system: - Creators and tech-savvy people are able to cut out the bloat and enjoy a fast and secure web because they live in rich countries with good infrastructure - The average user. Ironically the first group creates the bloated web to extract money from the average user. The average user in rich countries can count on the infrastructure to have at least an acceptable browsing experience. - People in poor countries like Africa…