

What I'm working on at Google: Making the mobile web fast - hiteshiitk
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-im-working-on-at-google-making.html

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nostromo
This is one thing I love about Google. Most companies will task a group or
team with making their website faster -- at Google it's make the web faster.

It reminds me of a post-war vision statement at Sony which was basically be
the company that "changes the worldwide poor-quality image of Japanese
products." It wasn't just about Sony, it was about the whole country -- that's
cool.

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newman314
What can Google do to help say webOS become faster at mobile web access?

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nostromo
Google's mod_pagespeed (<http://code.google.com/speed/page-
speed/docs/module.html>) is an example of something Google did that can help
everyone on all platforms.

He talks a bit about it in the article too: "At a high level we are planning
to tackle problems in three broad areas: The mobile devices themselves; the
services they connect to; and the networks that connect them. On the device
side, we are looking at a wide range of OS, network stack, and browser
enhancements to improve performance. On the service side, we are looking at
better ways to architect websites for mobile clients, providing tools to help
web developers maximize their performance, and automatic optimizations that
can be performed by a site or in a proxy service. Finally, at the network
layer we are looking at the (sometimes painful) interactions between different
layers of the protocol stack and identifying ways to streamline them."

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MatthewPhillips
Isn't he greatly understating the significance of mobile browser performance?
Isn't it the #1 blocker right now? Mobile browsers parse javascript much
slower than on the desktop. Even the iPad can't keep up with a lot of
simplistic canvas games. Google needs a team dedicated to fixing this problem.

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newman314
Improving V8 on mobile would be a start.

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andybak
The biggest thing Google could do for the mobile web is force carriers onto a
quicker Android update cycle.

The implementation of CSS media queries is broken in nearly all shipped
handsets making them pointless as an optimization for sending the correct
images to browsers. This isn't likely to change for quite a while.

The Android browser really needs to auto-update like the desktop Chrome.

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Aissen
How about independently upgradable system components ? I'd love my Android to
support "aptitude dist-upgrade" to upgrade WebKit, the Android Browser…

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keeperofdakeys
The phone carriers want control over your phone, they don't want you to be
able to easily 'upgrade' without their junk in it; it is in-fact the reason
why it takes so long. The situation is helped a bit when users buy phones and
plans separately, although it is becoming less popular to do this in my
country, I fear. This is what was so good about the Nexus One, Google pushed
updates directly.

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Aissen
This argument doesn't stand for OEM devices. And there are many of them with
no carrier customization whatsoever (current version of Samsung Galaxy S II),
with slow upgrades and no "system components" upgrade.

Google is _still_ pushing updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, so it's not
like it's the past.

By the way what I'm talking about is a limitation of Android itself: it has no
package management system (with dependencies, upgrade etc.) for core
components. And what I'm proposing would allow certain parts of the system to
be upgraded _while carrier junk stays there_.

Google is actually already doing that for Gmail, Market, Music, Maps and other
apps. Why not the browser ? (even if for now it uses a separate libwebkit)

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shagrath
I'm not an Android expert, but I think many libraries (browser, sms, phone,
etc.) are basically kernel/baseband dependent (To make an hardware accelerated
browser means modified GPU drivers, means new/updated kernel features, etc.),
so it's almost impossible to provide an unified build of some apps on current
devices (Gtalk video available only on 2.3.4 also comes to mind)

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smiler
Make the mobile web cheaper would be my first priority - data roaming rates
are insane

