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 → jrockway]

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 → eli]

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 → thaumaturgy]

+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 → jamesjyu]

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.

[sodiumjoe]

I think free ad-supported content allows for more discovery, too. I.e. how do you know what you want to pay for before you read it?

[zn → jrockway]

Google ads are actually a lot less obnoxious than any other company's ads that I have come across.

The other question is whether a lot of site that display ads do actually profit from them. Many users have ad blockers installed or turn away as soon as they see any kind of blinking banner (I do).

[socillion → jrockway]

I'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 → socillion]

If there were a <noads> tag to serve different content to people who will never ever click ads, I'd love to use it.

[Haplo → jrockway]

Maybe some people actually do want to keep most websites free and don't mind the Google ads and sometimes even find them interesting. (Yes, it may be hard to admit for some people but sometimes the ad is actually right what you want/need.)

[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 → rriepe]

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?

[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 → Groxx]

Like using an iPad.

[y0ghur7_xxx]

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

[devinj → y0ghur7_xxx]

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

[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 → mmaunder]

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

[sorbus → mmaunder]

I would expect that lots of publishers have many domains, which doesn't change that it sounds low, but perhaps explains why.

[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.

[m_myers → GeneralMaximus]

I disabled HTML and you wouldn't believe how fast my browser is now.

[shabble → GeneralMaximus]

The 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

[6ren → GeneralMaximus]

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 → 6ren]

> 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.

[jamesbritt → 6ren]

Countless sites require js to handle what amounts to html 3.2 behavior, such as showing content or submitting a form.

[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 → nekgrim]

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

[Tycho → pavel_lishin]

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.

[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.

[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 → padobson]

Have you tried using their async API?

[Roritharr → coob]

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

[hung]

tl;dr: Adsense loads asynchronously now.

[ericflo]

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

[Qz]

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

[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!

[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?