
Use Maps in Lite mode - richardboegli
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3031966
======
Yetanfou
If there is one thing Google services seem to have in common, it is that
they're burdened with sluggish javascript. Whether it is Google Maps, Google
Groups, Google Image browser (in Image search), all of them like to spike the
CPU at 100% for a while doing their thing, leaving the user staring at a
frozen tab or window. Having been around a bit I remember where Google Groups
came from, it used to be called Deja News. Back in the day I made a 2-pane
browser for reading news groups, functionally comparable to what Google Groups
does nowadays with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast.
Mind, this was in the time where we counted ourselves lucky with our 4 Mbit
fixed line and our 400 MHz Pentium II developer machines, using Netscape 4.x
on a Linux 2.x kernel with Afterstep or FvWM (or olvwm for Sun-OS
aficionados).

While these 'modern' services might be more flexible with their largely
client-generated UI, I feel that this comes at too high a price. This problem
is not just limited to Google services, other sites and services are similarly
hampered. Thing is, I'd have expected better performance from Google.

~~~
pmlnr
> with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast

When things were HTML, like most things "back in the days", thing were fast.
Frames, maybe iframes, and ready-to-consume HTML.

Does Squirrelmail rings a bell? It was one of the earliest popular webmails in
PHP, and it run every machines I accessed internet with, including 96MB RAM
Pentium I MMX laptop.

The current trend of outsourcing rendering to the client is not really a gain
for anyone: the server side still does a lot of arranging and magic on that
data which is served, while it could just generate HTML. Serve the already
done HTML, replace the parts in the DOM like we did in the beginning of the
AJAX days, and things would be much faster.

Out of curiosity, I installed a lesser known browser, Dillo. It's dumb: it can
parse a minimal amount of CSS and probably HTML ~4; the rest, it drops. And
voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum
HTML without JS - became instant. Using the word "fast" would be an
understatement.

We need to go back to the roots, otherwise we're using a lot of CPUs as
heaters.

~~~
spaceribs
I feel like this is a situation where developers are looking back to an
internet that doesn't exist anymore. In 2002, there were 665 million internet
users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing
[[http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-
users/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)].

If we were still stuck with terrible standards implementations and lack of
processing power, I would side with the "Lets do everything on the server
again!" argument, but we're not. For most use cases only privileged
information has the requirement of server processing, and if thats not a
requirement, why not take advantage of the device requesting the service?

Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance, and realize that as a
business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading
as much work as possible to the web client.

~~~
pmlnr
> In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion
> and growing

A significant part of that 3.4 billion are on mobile, which is even deeper
prone to the overused JS problem.

> terrible standards implementations

Ah, you mean IE6. In it's prime time, it was a brilliant browser, standards or
not; it was a necessary evil to forcefully move things ahead. It has XHR,
webfonts, a gazillion things none of the browsers had yet. It indeed stuck
around for too long, but this was not the case in it's initial state.

> lack of processing power

[https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-
fastes...](https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-
in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7#4509) -> Read the paragraph "#2 Do mobile first.
Like, really do it." We do lack processing power on mobile, so for that
2-3billion people, who are using mobile _only_ or mobile first, we need
economical solutions.

> why not take advantage of the device requesting the service?

Because you can't assume the device is powerful enough to do so. Why do you
think [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) still exists?

> Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance

You go against one of the initial hard rules of the web with that. I wonder if
is the importance of speed had changed, but judging by the grouchy voices all
around, it did not. People only keep using the services because they
deliberately made it hard to leave or because they learned tactics from
Microsoft and are constantly eliminating competitors.

> and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services
> profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client.

Now, this is complete nonsense; there is no money you save there. How is
generating all those React apps, shuffling all that data is better then
generating HTML? :)

Of course, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions, but most of the
things would not need mammoth sized invisible JSONs to be parsed in the
browser while the pre-rendered HTML could be served and manipulated only when
needed.

~~~
spaceribs
I think your misunderstanding surrounds the amount of processing required to
render HTML on the server, if you believe that rendering JSON is just as
expensive, I'm open to the discussion but I don't agree.

Usually these applications are compiled once, and delivered by CDN. That's a
huge savings.

Also I'm not saying the speed of Google Maps in your browser is acceptable,
but with tools like Webpack Chunking, you can optimize even the initial load
to nothing. This is a software architecture problem, not a javascript problem.

~~~
pmlnr
Maybe you're right, but I'm interested on your opinion about the rest of my
answer, such as mobile browser capacities.

~~~
spaceribs
There is no way you'd want to leak even more information about the machine
such as RAM and CPU power, I feel like it's already dangerously easy to de-
anonymize users across websites simply using what's provided in headers and
described in the "navigator" global.

So with that in mind, I believe that Google Maps is purposefully not optimized
for most mobile clients. It's designed as a fallback if you don't install the
app (which they are deeply incentivized to peddle).

I also think other web applications that get to the point of ~5 seconds of
loadtime need to rethink their compiling strategy (if at all possible). I
mentioned webpack before, but spreading out the work of large payloads is a
well documented issue with many different solutions. If it's the CPUs fault,
you should be using Web Workers.

My original point stands though, processing on the client is free, scalable
and an effective solution even considering the harm it could inflict on UX,
and those harms can be mitigated.

------
lucb1e
Google Maps is the best for businesses, but the site is extremely slow (lite
mode or no) and, at least in the Netherlands, they're behind with road data.
When I want a map I use osm.org; when I want aerial I use bing.com/maps; and
when I need opening hours or find the nearest restaurant I reluctantly open
Google Maps.

~~~
jsumrall
What do you use for turn-by-turn driving directions in the car?

~~~
arviewer
I still prefer TomTom, don't mind to pay for all the time it saves me. It's
not perfect, but it works for me.

~~~
hueving
Interesting, how does TomTom save you time over the gmaps navigation? I just
tell my phone, "navigate to <business name>" and 15 seconds later it's telling
me where to go. What am I missing?

~~~
pookeh
You are (not) missing mobile data. Granted, Google maps now have an offline
mode, but even the it is for a limited region only.

~~~
modeless
The only limit to how big an area you can cover with Google offline maps is
your storage. Each individual offline map is limited in size but you can
download as many as you want to cover as big an area as you can fit in your
phone.

~~~
pookeh
That's not practical for me...not very fun saving 100+ areas of the regions
and countries.

Also, from
[https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Plat...](https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOS&hl=en..).

> Note: Downloading offline areas isn't available in some regions because of
> contractual limitations, language support, address formats, or other
> reasons.

~~~
modeless
100+ 120,000 sq km areas, huh? You visit 12 million sq km of land on a regular
basis?

Yes, Google can't provide offline maps in some countries. This is true of all
mapping applications, though some have better offline coverage than others,
nobody has everywhere. For example HERE does not offer offline maps in Japan
or South Korea.

~~~
moltonel
You'll need 100s of areas if you want to minimise your local storage usage,
and micro-managing that would be a PITA. GM announces 'up to 1750mb' to
download the part of my country I traveled to in the last month, it's a non-
starter.

Compare that to the 179mb/113mb that I need with OSMAnd/Maps.me for the _whole
country_ without fiddling. Add to that the fact that OSM's data is
significantly better than Google Map's for my country (YMMV) and that there's
no such thing as "offline mode not available in some regions" with OSM.

------
ronjouch
Tangential question: Maps automatically switches to Lite mode under certain
browser conditions. It does so on my home Firefox machine (Dev. Edition
52.0a2, Linux, Intel HD Graphics 520), and:

\- When I deactivate all my addons it still does.

\- When I try a new profile it no longer does.

-> If not an addon, to my knowledge of Firefox, the cause has to be a changed Firefox preference (right?). But if right, I changed so many of them, I have no idea which one causes the behavior. Before I binary-search that, any clue what the culprit pref might be?

The support page doesn't answer this question; its only relevant snip is that
_" Maps will take you to Lite mode and your maps won't have 3D images if you
have the following cards: [...] Intel GMA 3600"_, which I have (GMA3600 ==
HD520), but it must be outdated documentation, as Maps stays non-Lite with a
fresh profile.

~~~
nandhp
Do other WebGL applications work? Anything suspicious in the Graphics section
of about:support?

It's probably a preference, and you might start with something obvious like
webgl.disable=true. However, you might rather just try Refresh Firefox, which
resets your profile while keeping your bookmarks/history/open tabs.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-
reset-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-
ons-and-settings)

~~~
ronjouch
Yeah, other WebGL apps/demos work, and webgl.disable isn't set to true. I have
quite a few modified prefs and would like to avoid a Refresh, so I'm going to
just bisect across prefs. Thanks for the suggestions.

~~~
ronjouch
Ffffound it, it was a my general.useragent.override

------
speeder
I wish Google would allow classic maps back :(

For some reason, here Google Maps force lite mode, no matter how hard I try to
force normal mode.

Still, even in lite mode, it is incredibly slow, if it was slower it would go
backwards.

And it is missing basic features that classic maps had, like latitude and
longitude lines, and measurement.

~~~
agumonkey
I cringed when I realized bing maps were closer to classic gmaps than anything
google maps today.

------
DrinkWater
Actually this feels just as sluggish as the full version. Where exactly do you
guys see/feel the improvement?

~~~
shubb
It looks like this lite version loads all the map imagery as images (tiles)
from the server.

This compares to full version which uses Javascript to render some of the
roads and symbols as some kind of vector drawing on top of less detailed map
tiles.

I'd expect the Full version to require slightly less data transfer and behave
better when zooming in and out rapidly. When you zoom in on a vector drawing
it still looks sharp, so you just have to wait for more detailed roads to
appear. Whereas in Lite mode, you'd zoom in and stare at a blury tile until
the higher resolution one loaded.

I'd expect Lite to work better in a browser or network that just can't cope
with a web application. Old versions of IE, weird embedded browsers in smart
TVs, that sort of thing. Given what it is, I wouldn't expect it to work
better.

~~~
greggman
Actually the full version uses more data, it turns out vectors take more data
than jpeg tiles, at lease for urban areas.

The big differences excluding 3d features are things like

* you can rotate the map

* zoom is continuous

* the map can be customized on the fly to make it more relevant to your search. So for example a road can be highlighted for one search vs a different road highlighted for a different search. Different buildings/roads get labelled etc.

This was all covered to Google I/O when the current version of Google maps was
released 4 years ago

------
abpavel
I find it amusing that the list of features not present in the Lite mode
exactly matches the list of features I do not want.

~~~
adrianN
I get coordinates quite often to enter them into my Garmin GPS.

~~~
abpavel
All my Garmins are collecting dust since I tried Waze a year ago.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
The previous title was more informative (add "?force=lite" to the URL)

------
alyandon
Funnily enough, a few days ago I was looking up some information and noticed
I'm stuck in "lite mode" on Windows 10 with the latest dev channel of Chrome
because apparently my system doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Of course,
Edge works fine.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Isn't the Dev version essentially an alpha build?

~~~
alyandon
From my personal experience, not really. The Chrome dev channel is really
nothing more than a more recent build that is considered stable enough to
release into the wild to those that have opted into it. Things might break but
in reality they rarely do.

I won't go as far as to say I've never encountered bugs that I've noticed in
the dev channel release but anything that serious is usually fixed within a
matter of hours and it's happened to me like maybe twice in all the years that
I've been using it.

------
Nanite
Thanks, can anybody explain why google allowed maps to turn into a such a
sluggish feature bloat?

~~~
kalleboo
Gotta keep adding features, otherwise what are all your team members going to
do?

~~~
flukus
Performance is a feature.

------
chii
i wish lite mode is the default, and you have to toggle on the lesser used
features.

------
richardboegli
I'm quite happy that Google has added this feature.

Sometimes Google maps on PC is that bad I have to get phone out.

~~~
lars_francke
FYI the lite mode has been available since they introduced the "new" Google
Maps in 2013 or so.

------
yoodenvranx
btw, what happened to the satelite images? I used Google Maps yesterday for
the first time in months and I can only switch to some horrible, slow, and
low-res 3D mode?

~~~
greyflames
It's still available in the side menu. If you click hamburger in the top left
> Earth > 3D On, it will switch to satellite imagery.

~~~
yoodenvranx
Thanks, I will give it a try later!

------
ww520
Thank you Google. Maps has been sluggish for so long. A faster lite version is
very much appreciated.

------
creeble
I see that ?force=lite seems to enable this mode, but I have no indication of
it in the hamburger menu.

Anyone else seeing this? I'm currently on the Kindle web browser, and it
definitely seems faster, but I can't tell want mode it's in except by diggimg
around the URL.

~~~
richardboegli
You should see a lightning bolt in the lower right hand corner

~~~
creeble
Weird, I get nuttin. Same in my Droid Turbo Chrome browser.

Will try on desktop Chrome.

------
emilburzo
It's interesting that it doesn't have a point of interest I added recently (on
13/Dec/2016).

I was assuming they would be using the same data as regular Maps.

Does anyone know more?

~~~
untog
The Lite version uses image-based map tiles, wheras the "full fat" version
uses the data directly. I imagine the image tiles are rebuilt at regular
intervals, but not on demand.

------
aakarpost
Much better. Thanks. :)

------
andygambles
Would have thought Google got really clever and detected if bandwidth is low
to load lite version.

~~~
helb
It's more about device/browser performance than bandwidth.

~~~
hueving
Tell that to someone with a slow connection.

~~~
cornedor
I think the full version might even use less bandwidth because it renders the
tiles on the client and only sends some vector data.

------
iand
Excellent, this actually makes Maps usable for me. I don't have flash
installed which seems to break place searching on standard Google Maps but not
the Lite version.

~~~
pmontra
I do have Flash installed but it's configured as "Ask to activate". Search for
places on the full Google Maps works and it doesn't ask me about Flash.

~~~
iand
I may be mistaken about the cause. I'm on Linux and use FF without flash.
Chromium with in-built flash (or flash emulation?) handles maps fine.

~~~
pmontra
I'm also on Linux and Firefox. Ubuntu 16.04. I don't remember if Flash came
with FF or I installed it. Anyway it doesn't run unless I OK it.

