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Your Web, Half a Second Sooner
- nekgrim 16y agoA 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 16y agoI vowed to never surf again without Flashblock after some ads started automatically yelling at me with sound and video.
- Tycho 16y agoEverytime 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.
- y0ghur7_xxx 16y agoI am actually adblocking show_ads.js, so that makes the web even faster for me.
- devinj 16y agoActually, it's statistically indistinguishable, according to Google.
- geuis 16y agoWhat's a really great way to both speed up your site and make it look more professional? Don't put Google ads on it!
- Groxx 16y agoTranslation: 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 16y agoLike using an iPad.
- rriepe 16y agoI 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 16y agoBest 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?
- mmaunder 16y agoI'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 16y agoDespite the vast number of domains added per day, domains that are monetized are only held by a relatively few individuals.
- sorbus 16y agoI would expect that lots of publishers have many domains, which doesn't change that it sounds low, but perhaps explains why.
- stingraycharles 16y agoInteresting 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.
- hung 16y agotl;dr: Adsense loads asynchronously now.
- siculars 16y ago"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?
- jrockway 16y agoIt'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.)
- socillion 16y agoI'd argue that those most likely to use Adblock and similar addons are those least likely to ever click on them. My (quite anecdotal) observation is that many less technologically minded users notice and click on ads, while more experienced users see only the content and grow tired of flashing in their peripheral vision. That hypothesis extends partially to why Hacker News and similar are so different from, for example, the much messier layout of cnn.com.
- storborg 16y agoIf there were a <noads> tag to serve different content to people who will never ever click ads, I'd love to use it.
- eli 16y agoAdvertising 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 16y agoNeither 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.
- Qz 16y agoAnd by "Your Web", they mean "Our Web".
- ericflo 16y agoI'm surprised this isn't getting more play. This is huge.
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoOfftopic, 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.
- m_myers 16y agoI disabled HTML and you wouldn't believe how fast my browser is now.
- 6ren 16y agoGood 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?
- jamesbritt 16y agoCountless sites require js to handle what amounts to html 3.2 behavior, such as showing content or submitting a form.
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago> 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.
- shabble 16y agoThe downside to NoScript (as someone who's been using it for a while), is when you do find a site you want to visit, which for whatever reason requires its scripts to function properly, you're often left at the menu, wondering which of the half a dozen or more scripts you actually need to allow (some advertising / metrics companies can be easily spotted by domain, but often you've got the original site, maybe one or two static content domains, perhaps a CDN.) It gets to be a hassle
- padobson 16y agoIt'd be nice of Facebook was so focused on speed - the like button slows down every webpage I've ever put it on dramatically.