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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The quickest way for a 'dramatic' speedup of the web is to install an ad blocker.

Also, 'dramatic' speedups will only lead to pages that get loaded up with more junk.

If that had not happened we'd already have an extremely fast browsing experience. It's like memory and disk space, if the budget increases then there will be some way to spend that budget.

If web pages load in under one second they'll be 'improved' until they load in 3 to 4 seconds again.

spdy:// ? I don't think so.

Let's drop some of that flash and turn on gzip compression (if you haven't done that already) and make sure your cache headers are set properly.

That alone will probably give you a 50% boost.

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While your points are valid in order for webapps to continue their march in to desktop app territory they need to decrease latency. I think this is what spdy is there for.

I'm sure a lot of fat will be added to apps but if my AJAX requests are snappier I am more then happy to support this.

from:

http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/spdy/spdy-whitepa...

"To target a 50% reduction in page load time. Our preliminary results have come close to this target (see below)."

The bigger chunk of which seems to come from header compression.

SPDY is targeted to be placed between HTTP and TCP.

It 'only' requires changes to the client and the webservers.

That makes me a little skeptical about the value of their tests, I can't imagine they got the top 500 websites to change their server architecture to allow this test to take place.

They are very much focused on the latency issues but the only references they give are for things related to page load time, which are affected peripherally by latency, but latency is much more of an effect on single connections.

And the only gain from that would be to compress the headers.

If header compression is that much of a deal then I would suggest to add optional header compression to the http standard, not to place layers in between http and tcp.

And that layer would have to add 0 overhead all by itself on single connections or the results would be negative instead of positive.

You can't really support this unless the client supports it as well, think of it as a specialized gateway function inside the browser that knows how to tunnel HTTP over SPDY to hosts that support it, the key factor is interleaving frames of content from different sources. Essentially a packet multiplexer/demultiplexer if I read it all right, that will pack all the requests on the sending side and unpack them at the receiving end to go to their respective handlers.

By the way, the 'server pushes resources before the client has asked for it' is what has been making my webcam software functional for the last 15 years or so.

I clued in to that in '95 or so using the server-push technology and figured out that since I already knew that the next request would be for another frame of the same cam why not send it right now instead of waiting for the browser to ask for it...

>> "The quickest way for a 'dramatic' speedup of the web is to install an ad blocker."

Because most websites would go out of business and there wouldn't be much left to browse?

Possibly. But then again, I don't see any ads on HN, and I do remember a version of the web that did not have advertising on it. It also had a significantly better signal to noise ration than the current one does.

That web still exists, if you can keep your eyes off the flashy pretty stuff.

I had dialin access in '93, and my first browser was Mosaic on Win3.1 under Trumpet Winsock, and I ran the tech side of an ISP from 95-97, and under no circumstances would I ever trade the web of '97 for the one I have today, where I can watch TV, browse Cooks Illustrated, learn Calculus, and read entire books. I wouldn't even trade Hacker News for Usenet.

The signal to noise ratio in '97 was high because there was very little signal, and not as many people cared.

> The signal to noise ratio in '97 was high because there was very little signal

I don't agree with that at all, there was plenty of signal, it just wasn't in 'rich media' format. Pages were static and simple instead of having a multi-media circus to put across a simple point.

RiderOfGiraffes has a neat little page up elsewhere right now that could have existed in exactly the same form in '96.

The web changed dramatically when 'big money' moved in and started turning the whole thing into a shopping mall / advertising space and I really think that that is degrading the medium.

The internet has certainly improved in many ways since then as you rightfully illustrate but there was lots of good in those early days (of the web) as well, and plenty of it got destroyed.

Usenet is a good example, there are those who argue that usenet had had it's run and that the web killed it, but it is my opinion that the spam is what killed it, not the competition from the web.

Probably I prefer to have less signal but of a higher quality rather than an absolute overload where you have to sift for the bits that are worth your time.

I think if you and I go point for point on modern web vs. '97 web, you will lose pretty quickly. The things you remember from the halcyon days of the Internet (Archie, Gopher, anonymous FTP sites, Sendmail vulnerabilities, and Usenet) aren't even better than the individual things that have replaced them today.

Quick. What's the site you most miss that the modern "corporate" web has destroyed?

I agree with you that 'point for point' I'd lose in a heartbeat.

I'm not talking about individual sites, it is more a sense of atmosphere, the lack of commerce.

And the lack of opportunity, an odd thing to overlook on this site.

I would think that it was the opposite, the enormous opportunity, to change the world significantly for the better, there was an atmosphere of 'this time we'll get it right', simply because 'big money' was looking the other way.

That changed somewhere around 1997 or so, and was absolutely unstoppable.

Anyway, I can see there is no way I'm going to be able to make you see what I'm getting at. I'm grasping at putting a feeling in to words and apparently the words fail me. But I can't help that feeling...

Ok, I've decided to put some action to my feeling, I'm going to run an experiment to make advertising on my sites optional, since I feel that I have become a part of the problem. We'll see how it works out.

I'll identify one problem that the Internet ca. 1997 did not have: excessive discussion site mobility. If I wanted security information, I subscribed to one mailing list, Bugtraq. (Ok, I toyed with Firewalls@GreatCircle and a few others, but they were a waste of time). I read comp.security.unix and sci.crypt. These never migrated. I never had to unsubscribe from Bugtraq and move to "new cybersecurity" or any other crap.

Contrast that to post-1997. You had a brief blip of SecurityFocus around 1999, and in 2003 it began fragmenting into a myriad of blogs. For tech news, we saw the migration of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN. Each time they grew, lost focus, and people with words worth reading moved on.

Bugtraq is around today but I do not read it. Take each minor bug report and multiply it by X-dozen vendor echo bulletins and it becomes unbearable. HN is on the verge of falling into the political trap of digg.

Meanwhile, random blogs pop up, have some useful posts for < 1 year and then die off or evolve into navel-gazing and I unsubscribe. An RSS reader is useless to find new blogs. I'll sit out twitter until it turns into a ghost town in a few years, thanks.

The BBS was great for locality. You knew most people on it because it was extremely local. Earlier Usenet was the same, just organized by topic instead of location. I contend that the web replacement for these has not yet arrived.

Craigslist or random PHPBB message boards may be somewhat local, but the former is too broad for real discussion and the latter tends to be too narrow (say, a neighborhood association focused on pets).

Topical discussion is very fragmented and migrates between sites too often. I don't think it's an advance to have to keep changing sites or access methods (NNTP, Web, RSS) without any real change in functionality. It's change due to novelty or running from spammers or dumb commenters.

We need less change, not more. This is something that was better in 1997.

> Also, 'dramatic' speedups will only lead to pages that get loaded up with more junk.

Jevon's paradox in action?

Good parody of the internet curmudgeon, there.

Have a look at how the large majority of the top 500 web servers are set up and see if you disagree.

A large portion of them could be sped up by simply configuring them properly, using nothing but the facilities that are available today.

I'm not sure if this link will 'live' for other others, but it is an analysis of cnn.com, it shows the homepage clocks in at a whopping 1.1M!

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/091113_2YFS/

And has tons of caching and compression issues.

Feel free to try out any other 'large' website and you'll find that only very few of them actually come in green across the board.

A large portion of them could be sped up by simply configuring them properly, using nothing but the facilities that are available today.

Probably true, but not relevant to SPDY: you can't assume that every website in the world is going to be configured "properly." SPDY's improvements are orthogonal to other improvements that might be made to site configurations.

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