How Google is wasting your bandwidth

nichol.as

14 points·leonh··5 comments

Ok, kids, no need to get worked up. Here's why.

1.3.2 is an EXACT VERSION. This will not change, so it's safe to save it for a while.

1.3 is the last bug fix of the 1.3 version. You want this to change, if you want the latest bugfixed 1.3 version.

?ver=1.3.2 is a parameter that Wordpress adds to break caching, and voila, it breaks caching.

The kerfluffle is like saying, when I drive, I floor it, then I slam on the breaks to stop, and my gas mileage is TERRIBLE and my car is wasting my gas.

Good to know what to request to ensure you get a cached version, but the title is pure linkbait.

How is Google is wasting your bandwidth? They are just wasting (a tiny bit) of their own bandwidth.

I have no idea what he's getting so worked up about - a free CDN doesn't work exactly as he expects? But still works - and offloads some work from his servers ...

Google is wasting bandwidth on the client side not the server side. He means millions of people are downloading jquery over and over instead of pulling it from their browser cache because of the messed-up expire header.

When you are optimizing your website, 60k is a lot, especially when this gets re downloaded on every page.

Client side optimizing is a big thing, by using CSS/JS compression, CSS sprites or late loading through stuff such as labjs you are talking about relatively tiny pieces. But you can feel this extra latency and it will show in your conversion and bounce rates.

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