Google Ends Page Speed Service | Hacker News Reader

Google Ends Page Speed Service

developers.google.com

104 pointsrobk49 comments

Hoping to clear up some confusion: there are three things under the PageSpeed name.

* PageSpeed Insights: tells you how to make your website faster and gives you a score.

* PageSpeed Modules (mod_pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed): open source web server plugins that rewrite your site to load faster.

* PageSpeed Service: Google-hosted proxy version of the PageSpeed Modules.

We're only deprecating PageSpeed Service.

(I'm the TL for the open source modules.)

Thanks for the clarification. I use PageSpeed via a couple of App Engine apps that have it enabled directly from App Engine's admin dashboard. I never had to change any DNS settings to get it to work. Does this shutdown also mean that PageSpeed will no longer be offered for App Engine apps? Do I need to take any action to avoid a service interruption for my users?

Yes, App Engine support is also deprecated:

     If you are using PageSpeed integration on Google App
     Engine, it will continue to function until 1st
     December 2015, after which PageSpeed optimizations
     will no-longer be applied to your app. No action is
     required on the part of App Engine users; after this
     date apps will continue to operate, except without
     the benefit of the PageSpeed optimizations.

App Engine users only need to take action if they have something on their site that depends on PageSpeed, which is very uncommon.

I didn't have to worry at all about trying to use webassets in realtime. That's just one of the numerous optimisations I'll sorely miss

Point of clarification - this isn't the Page Speed testing, but their "optimizing proxy" that you'd route your site through (like Cloudflare).

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't even realize they offered this - CloudFlare really seems to dominate the narrative in this area.

They didn't offer it, really; new signups had been closed for a long time now.

This was an amazing product to me one year ago. I used it as CDN for my blog hosted Amazon EC2; it speeded up the visits a lot across the world.

However, I stopped using it last year since China blocked all Google service while my blog is mostly for Chinese readers. Though the proxy/cdn service is shutting down, the Pagespeed Module of Apache/Nginx is awesome, which is what I am using right now.

I was one of the first users of this product, and worked with Rahul Bainsal and others quite a bit on it. It was a very powerful product diligently worked upon by a talented team. One can only hope they'll get something juicy to work on now!

Despite the deprecation, the PSS team is very much worthy of a salute.

I wasn't planning on announcing yet, but this seems like a good opportunity.

I'm working on a service that does real-time monitoring of your website performance, as measured by your actual users, on their browser. If that sounds interesting, my email is in my profile.

Like New Relic?

Similar, yes. I have beta users who hated New Relic's server-side setup.

I'm also treating this more as a production monitoring tool, rather than a dev tool.

This is already included in Analytics

People pay good money for Mixpanel and Kissmetrics, even though Google Analytics exists.

I find GA's UI to be absolutely terrible. I plan on having better UI, more detailed performance breakdown, and alerts / monitoring.

I actually find GA's UI pretty good. Much better than Flurry analytics for example.

send me an email sergiotapia@outlook.com

Not sure if I should be using Google for anything except search ( pretty much most of my eggs are in the google basket )

Certainly anything that's not a core Google product you should think hard about using. I got burned when they shut down Checkout. They gave me six months notice on that, which was just barely enough to replace shopping cart, order management, and payment processing. The first two I now have in house, so no one can turn them off.

At least this one's fairly easy to fix, but I think there will be plenty of people unpleasantly surprised on 3 Aug.

I semi actively follow this space and had no idea that this service was ever out of private beta. I'd have put my clients on it almost immediately had I of known. What a shame.

It wasn't worth the additional latency in most cases, so few people used it.

Not directly related to the end of the service but

> The Google Developers website now saves the pages you visit when you are logged into Google. You can quickly access them via the history icon at the top of the site.

What? That's my web browser responsibility...

It seems to be implied that this is the same team as Mod_Pagespeed? Hopefully that won't get discontinued as well, it's pretty valuable

We're not planning to deprecate mod_pagespeed; it's still under active development.

This is why we don't rely on Google for anything in production, or anything that is actually important to us.

It wasn't a very good measure of page speed anyways. For example the Microsoft dev site scores 83/100 and loads faster than any site I've ever seen before.

It sounds like you're talking about PageSpeed Insights? [1] That's not deprecated. This announcement is about PageSpeed Service, the Google-hosted optimizing proxy.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

You're talking about a different service as an FYI. What you are referring to is Page Speed insights service which for the record is actually pretty amazing.

If Google shuts down Insights I will do just like Achmed ("I'll kill you!") :)

One more product that Google retires. I like Gmail, Google, etc but the way Google deprecate their product start to concern me.

Might have something to do with another comment in this thread...

> I didn't even realize they offered this - CloudFlare really seems to dominate the narrative in this area.

Is this something you used? Does its turndown affect you? anyone?

I've used CloudFlare in a number of projects, usually with great results. Though occasionally they have problems, but that's usually a local issue with one of their data centers.

One thing that would be awesome is if you could add a Google Analytics tracking code, so you could track how often their error page is shown.

Gmail and "Google" aren't going anywhere.

No, but any company doing something interesting which they acquire can expect to have their product discontinued in a couple of years max.

I am guessing you don't mean that Gmail hasn't really progressed in many years now. Sure, they've bolted on features and functionality, but they have also probably intentionally delayed or been distracted from adding real value because e.g., it would have competed or distracted from other projects like G+ by, e.g., improving the contacts view, which is really rather unusable.

Another issue that bothers the hell out of me is that with all the scanning of emails they do they can't figure out a probably date and time from emails that were turned into events, which mention a date and time in the body or subject.

Something I also find rather annoying is that you can't filter messages only to me from a specific sender but without any other recipients.

Gmail progressed; it progressed so far people probably wouldn't like it if it was changed out from under them (like with New Coke) so they called the progression Inbox instead.

Honest question: besides Google Reader, what has Google terminated that people actually used?

Google Code Search

RIP :-(

Web apps that I used on a daily basis: Notebook (very simple and there are others, but none have been as good IMO), Code Search, [Reader], iGoogle, SMS (although they killed it just before I got a smartphone. I would still use it for when I don't have data though).

Other sites that I used from time to time and miss: Meebo (mainly before Google purchase, but continued to use sometimes), Knol (I contributed to it and thought it was great), Video (I preferred the interface to YT and uploaded stuff to it until I no longer could), Answers (love reading it, great idea)

From personal experience:

Search API: used to be able to submit keywords and get XML results back, now it's AJAX-only and spits out formatted HTML, only 10 results, and different from real search results. Mostly useful for people involved in SEO. No big loss without it, but just means you have to scrape SERPs instead of getting them nicely bundled up.

Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/) which is far faster and more responsive.

Bookmarks: Edit: It is still there.

Health: I didn't use this directly, but many of us in the healthcare industry were looking to see how Google could shake things up. Apparently, PHI is hard and Google discontinued their service.

Voice: It hasn't been discontinued yet, but I feel certain this will be the next big product to go. The service (and app) hasn't been updated in years, there is no clear monetization strategy aside from international VOIP calling (which other applications do better), and the messaging portion is mostly covered by cellular carriers as "visual voicemail" with the widespread use of smartphones.

"Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/) which is far faster and more responsive. "

At the time it was discontinued. Microsoft had made it next to impossible to build your own desktop search. In particular, it was nearly impossible to turn off the indexing service they built (and required user intervention), making GDS slow, and they also started blocking/changing the API's GDS was using to make it fast. So basically, Google killed it because they didn't think they could keep making it good.

(Nowadays, i'm pretty sure you could do it again, but ...

Also, humorously, your link gets connection refused for me :P)

"Health: I didn't use this directly, but many of us in the healthcare industry were looking to see how Google could shake things up. Apparently, PHI is hard and Google discontinued their service."

Everyone who didn't get out of this (IE MS) has only avoided doing so to avoid looking bad (When i was hiring in DC, i used to get tons of resumes from people at these services, all saying "they won't kill it completely, but they are not investing it in anymore so i want out"). From what i know, the industry is just too much of a mess and regulatory environment too weird for most companies to be significantly successful here right now.

"Voice: It hasn't been discontinued yet, but I feel certain this will be the next big product to go. The service (and app) hasn't been updated in years, there is no clear monetization strategy aside from international VOIP calling (which other applications do better), and the messaging portion is mostly covered by cellular carriers as "visual voicemail" with the widespread use of smartphones."

Go in what sense? As a separate product? I could see that. The functionality? ISTM the likely result here is that it just becomes part of hangouts or whatever.

Not sure what the problem is with the link; it seems to work fine for me from a few different ISPs.

I meant "go" as in "get axed as a product." I agree that it's likely to roll into Hangouts, since their offerings are trending toward the Google+ apps.

The Voice app on iOS went for years without an update, but it was updated fairly recently to match iOS 7 aesthetics.

I think the plan with Voice is to keep the functionality, but move it into the Hangouts product/app.

> Bookmarks: Rolled into Notebook, which was discontinued itself and pushed into Google Docs. So, I guess it's still there, kinda?

Certainly looks like it's there to me: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

I used Google Checkout for payment processing, shopping cart, and order management. Having all that in one package was nice during development. It was a really bad day when I heard I had only six months to replace all that.

xmpp federation

There was this app called Location or sth., which they terminated. I did not know about the thing myself until then, but on the HN track there were quite some people declaring it being an integral part of their life. I recall clearly a man telling that he was following the position of his wife via this application, for the wife was somehow working in context of a war--a journalist or sth.--and he wanted to be able to follow her for emergency situations. And other couples who were following each other for some reason. If only I recalled the name of it... But I'm sure someone here will be able to append a link.

edit: Oh, yes, it's Latitude, and the thread I'm referring is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018554

And the wife is an animal control officer. Less dramatic but equally saddening.

Google Answer, Google Code, iGoogle, Google Reader, Orkut, Wave, Health. Pretty sure they are more... Every 6 months their is an announcement about something like that OR about something that has radical change like Angular 1 to 2 which is really changing. Stability is not something Google products offer to their customers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmo5

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