
Your Web, Half a Second Sooner - taylorbuley
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/03/your-web-half-second-sooner.html
======
jrockway
It's even faster if you just block the ads.

Plus, as soon as everyone starts blocking ads, we can start building products
that are user-oriented instead of advertiser-oriented. (Why yes, I _do_ pay
for content that I want to read.)

~~~
eli
Advertising isn't inherently evil. At its best it actually adds value to the
viewer. Consider the ads in bridal magazines or during the Super Bowl.

Perhaps the NYTimes can pull off a paywall (we'll see soon enough), but most
content producers can't. So where does that leave us? Micropayments? Would you
really want to pay to Tweet?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Neither quite here nor there: I noticed recently that DuckDuckGo has signed up
with Carbon Ads for their website advertising, and I _really_ like it.

I've been an ardent ad-blocker for years now, and I'm actually glad Carbon Ads
gets past the filter, because the ads it shows look great, somehow manage to
get my attention without competing for it, _and_ are showing some pretty neat
services that I hadn't heard of before.

~~~
jamesjyu
+1 for niche ad networks that know their audiences.

I recently added Influads (similar to carbon) on one of my side projects, and
I actually got a complement about the ads from a user! That was the last thing
I expected.

~~~
Dramatize
I love these ads because they work as a filter for new products I might be
interested in.

The ad networks are selective about the companies they accept.

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rriepe
I think the subtext here is that they're trying to speed things up, while
Facebook seems to be slowing down every other page I visit by two seconds or
so.

~~~
ericras
Best fix is to use the NoScript extension for Firefox and in Advanced->ABE add
the following so FB crap only loads when you visit facebook proper:

    
    
      Site .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
      Accept from .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
      Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)
    

To be fair, isn't Facebook moving towards using iframes (similar to what this
article talks about) and away from fbml - facebook markup lang?

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Groxx
Translation:

We were slowing down the internet by more than 1/2 a second on every page. Now
we're doing it less.

Less bad is more good, yes. I wonder what life is like without AdBlock,
though.

~~~
jodrellblank
Like using an iPad.

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y0ghur7_xxx
I am actually adblocking show_ads.js, so that makes the web even faster for
me.

~~~
devinj
Actually, it's statistically indistinguishable, according to Google.

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mmaunder
I'm surprised Google is only doing this now. The most interesting thing in the
article is "...JavaScript used by more than two million publishers...". I
thought AdSense had greater distribution. e.g. There are over 100,000 new
domains registered every 24hrs for the dot-com TLD alone.

~~~
true_religion
Despite the vast number of domains added per day, domains that are monetized
are only held by a relatively few individuals.

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GeneralMaximus
Offtopic, maybe: I've taken to blocking _all_ JavaScript using NoScript. I
don't want random strangers from the Internet running programs on my computer.
Besides, disabling JavaScript has made my browser so fast it's not even funny.
Pages load instantly, runaway scripts no longer take 25% CPU, pages don't try
to autorefresh every 5 seconds. And, of course, no Google or FB ads.

~~~
6ren
Good idea! But how often do you use sites that need JS? e.g. real estate
sites, google maps

Also: can't you just disable JS in your browser, for the same effect?

~~~
GeneralMaximus
> _But how often do you use sites that need JS? e.g. real estate sites, google
> maps_

That is why I use NoScript. I can temporarily enable JS on any page with one
click.

Turns out I don't need to enable JS on 99% of the websites I visit.

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nekgrim
A little pretentious, but it's a great news to see that sometimes, ads seller
are thinking about optimizations (I'm looking at you, flash banner ads)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I vowed to never surf again without Flashblock after some ads started
automatically yelling at me with sound and video.

~~~
Tycho
Everytime I load my homepage (Yahoo UK) on my desktop (a G4 Mac Mini), I can
hear the fans speed up dramatically to cope with the additional CPU burden
introduced by the Flash ads.

It makes me wonder how much energy is spent on a) spinning the fans to serve
these ads b) forcing people to upgrade their otherwise-perfectly-capable
computers

Globally it probably equates to quite a big figure.

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stingraycharles
Interesting that they took the approach of injecting iframes inside the page
instead of deferring the ad call via something like a DOMContentLoaded event.
Using the DOMContentLoaded event would even allow them to request all
advertisements on a page in a single call.

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padobson
It'd be nice of Facebook was so focused on speed - the like button slows down
every webpage I've ever put it on dramatically.

~~~
coob
Have you tried using their async API?

~~~
Roritharr
is there something like an async like button? quick google search didn't
turned anything up

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hung
tl;dr: Adsense loads asynchronously now.

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ericflo
I'm surprised this isn't getting more play. This is _huge_.

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Qz
And by "Your Web", they mean "Our Web".

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geuis
What's a really great way to both speed up your site and make it look more
professional?

Don't put Google ads on it!

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siculars
"The old show_ads did lots of work: loading additional scripts, gathering
information about the web page it was running on, and building the ad request
to send back to Google."

Tracking users and crushing privacy. Sucking down clock cycles all over the
world. You didn't think you got that for free, did you?

