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Comment by tmd83 | Hacker News Reader

I am really curious what's the general opinion on Googler's as a web developer. I have seen a long while ago some nice articles from Google about site optimization.

Do they even follow any of their original advice or Google basically keep doing over engineered stuff fixed by adding another set of over engineered staff?

Let's talk gmail. I just refreshed the window and it did close to 400 request, ~8MB download which translates to nearly 40MB resource. And it keeps making more requests even when I'm not doing anything.

And a refresh of Google.com the search page did 33 request and nearly a MB download.

And they are preaching the world about optimizing the web?

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>And they are preaching the world about optimizing the web?

The transformation has been amazing. Google properties, to the extent that they used to have a unified aesthetic, used to be quite lean and mean. How anyone can look at a product like Gmail and say that this is coming from a standard bearer on efficient use of resources is beyond me.

Oh I recall that so well. I started using google during my 4KB/s internet. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

GMail is literally the interface where you delete a mail, go to close the tab and a fucking modal popup appears because there are still ill-specified network requests in flight. It is so unbelievably bad.

Similar thing with their Google Cloud Console: 159 requests, 3.5MB and 13 seconds for the initial page load. Opening any page takes at least 3 further seconds, but usually more like 6 seconds - on a 4-core CPU with 16GB RAM.

Yes because heavy pages clog their crawlers. Of course they are not following their advice (neither does FB)

This is great: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

I mean, kudos to Google for (probably) not cheating here, but that's a low score.

And thats only for the login page.

Yeah but they have the best SEO

And I don't really understand why they don't follow their advise. Saving a single byte on Google front page can potentially save terabytes of bandwidth. I know the idea of "developers are expensive, hardware is cheap" but when you serve trillions of search queries, hardware is worth considering. The 8 MB you get don't come from nowhere, there is a server somewhere sending them to you.

And improving user experience for billions of users is not a negligible advantage either.

Maybe it is a sign that Google is ready to be taken over by a less bloated company. It is, after all, how Google came to power, by being efficient and to the point. Just look at to original Google home page compared to its competitors.

This actually gets back to the issue of web bundles. Google doesn't have to worry about the 8 MB because they have an extensive CDN, but smaller sites have to save every bit because they are being charged for it. If Google can leverage its CDN to serve the smaller sites, everyone wins.

Not only this. Almost all there services works with bugs and slow. Youtube interface if buggy when you upload and manage your video. Constantly have to wait for 30-60 seconds to change any setting on the channel. Also constant censorship, likes/views manipulations, search results manipulations. They only want to control people minds hiding behind good intentions.

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