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Comment by yyin | Hacker News Reader

This made me chuckle. I've been doing this type of stream editing for years, on the client side. Of course I strip out Javascript. In addition to blocking google-analytics, doubleclick, etc. client-side, via DNS. Google reminds me of Goldman Sachs: trying to take both sides of a bet. But Google can never deliver the best experience for the user, because the best experience does not include redirects to set cookies, tracking, ads and other nonsense that serves no benefit to the user. Either Google is for advertisers or it is for users. Users do not pay Google. Draw your own conclusions.

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What made you chuckle?

ngxpagespeed and its apache brother mod_pagespeed are absolutely incredible tools for improving performances of any website. It automates lots of work that used to have to be coded manually in your application, and moves the responsibility to the webserver. It, in the end, allows you with a dead simple configuration file, to minify, shard, optimize, and make many other performance optimization, without you ever worrying about implementing those yourself.

> Either Google is for advertisers or it is for users.

What does that have to do with ngxpagespeed?

I think the OP is confusing strategic and tactical decisions by Google. On a strategic board-level view, yes Google is an ad company and reducing web page size without stripping ads is a bit disingenuous. Strategically Google will never drop ads, so the next best step for this project probably won't happen

However tactically Google benefits from paying clever people to make great products irrespective of their strategic fit - and this seems a good product.

I had never heard of it, and will build it in my pipeline RSN.

> Strategically Google will never drop ads, so the next best step for this project

I'm curious what this step would be?

NGINX pagespeed is a server side module that you run before you send data to the end-user.

Many people who own servers want to extract revenue from their end-users, and yes, that means ads.

If pagespeed stripped ads from a person's website, I think they'd be very unappreciative of it.

Reducing page size while stripping ads is something that no one serving a web page would do so this line of reasoning is horseshit anyway.

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