

Chrome for Android working on optimizing page rendering via SPDY proxy servers - patrickaljord
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100132233764003563318/posts/afpgxPnAU6R

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hosay123
Every time a service like this appears (along with Fiber, Google DNS, Ajax
Libs, Google Analytics, ..) I'm left feeling that traffic data produced as a
side product is somehow being reused internally. My wild (and least paranoid)
guess is search quality: measuring site popularity using bandwidth as a proxy
would be incredibly difficult for spammers to fake on a large scale, and when
capturing logs for what increasingly appears to be the comprehensive majority
of Internet traffic, we're talking _really_ large scale.

Given user reports and experiences of Google DNS, it seems at least its stated
aim is barely satisfied in the general case: it is often slower than local ISP
servers. Similarly, sticking a proxy between a user and their destination may
add more latency than it could ever save, leading me to somewhat doubt the
public reason these services exist.

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Mahn
> I'm left feeling that traffic data produced as a side product is somehow
> being reused internally

Of course. One has to be very naive to believe data traveling to their servers
is being immediately discarded.

This reminds me of a story I saw once by Onavo, a mobile app which reduces
data usage by acting as a middleman and compressing the data before it reaches
the phone. The story however talked about which apps made the most revenue;
and guess how they knew: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/onavo-mobile-games-
grossing...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/onavo-mobile-games-grossing/)

 _The company looked at game usage among their U.S. iPhone users in November.
Then they looked at the market share, or the percentage of their U.S.-based
iPhone owners that use these games on a monthly basis._

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magnetikonline
The title is somewhat misleading - this change is using Google servers to
proxy SPDY traffic to/from a client browser for speed. It's not using the
proxy for "rendering" of actual pages, or parts thereof.

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micampe
The linked commit describes it as "Data Compression Proxy, Reduce data
consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers".

~~~
revelation
That might just be a layer doing lossy compression and sending the result to
you using SPDY. No rendering.

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crb
Yet another great post from François Beaufort introducing an upcoming feature
being developed in Chromium. I wonder - does François work for Google, or is
he just a watcher on the repositories?

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exterm
Learn from the best - again, a leading browser vendor is adopting a feature
pioneered by opera. I wonder whether there is any correlation with the demo of
a new opera mobile version last week that is essentially chrome with turbo.

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Achshar
With opera moving towards chromium, it appears chromium is moving towards
opera too. But this only leads to fuel the whole Google privacy snafu.

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Osiris
Not exactly true (unless you have some inside information). Opera announced
they are replacing their rendering engine with WebKit. There's been no
announcement that they are dumping the entire browser (which is a lot more
than just the rendering engine) to release a custom Chromium build.

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kinlan
Opera are moving to WebKit using the chromium project
[http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-
to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit)

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k_bx
offtopic: did new Chrome broke fonts completely only for me? They're now
blurry so I had to switch to Firefox.

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kinlan
On android we switched to a thing called impl side painting which helps hugely
with scrolling performance and other graphics. It could be that, file a bug on
crbug.com/new with your system details and pages where it happens.

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blinkingled
There's <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=174699> and they
seem to have identified the culprit patch.

Wonder how m25 was rolled out given how bad the fonts look and how many people
it impacted.

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ksec
Great, would this be available on Desktop too?

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jacquesm
Besides possible interpretation issues (with the text of TFA), what is so
great about something like that? The whole idea of the web is: the client
decides how it renders the data. If we targeted a remote hosted bit mapped
graphics terminal with a VNC like sharing protocol then the web would have
never taken off. But of course, the last line of defense in undoing the web is
to host VMs running your application and just sending over the bitmaps.

In the end this may be inevitable but I'll stick to HTTP as long as it is
feasible. These 'improvements' are a step back. More bandwidth to mobile would
be an improvement, as would be a mobile infrastructure without silly caps (you
know, like we had 5 years ago).

