Google takes about five seconds to load a web page. Over the last few years Google has worked hard and with incredible effort to reduce that time. Now there are otimizers that help. The hardware is getting faster and the infrastructure too, like the fiber optic link test being installed in Kansas City to see how well that concept works.
One thing we haven't seen covered is the time it takes for a user to decide on a page out of a list and then click on a link. In addition, about 300 milliseconds passes from the time a mouse hovers over a link until it is clicked. That time could be used to begin prefetching the link.
Arvind Jain and Sreeram Ramachandram from Google unveil Chrome Instant, a new feature built right into Google's browser Chrome, to make your search results load faster. With Chrome Instant enabled, Google makes an intelligent guess about which search result you are most likely to click on, and pre-loads that search result into a new, hidden tab in Chrome. If you do click on the search result, the hidden tab is unhidden, creating the illusion of an instant browsing experience.
A few technical challenges remain to be solved, such as the risk of pre-loading pages with blaring audio and video. However, Google is hopeful.
The technology is open source and Google hopes that all the vendors will make use of it.
Arvind Jain works as a Director of Engineering at Google. He is responsible for making Google products fast and also runs its “Make the Web faster” initiative. The mission encompasses a lot of Google projects because Jain's team is working on every area that slows down web pages. This includes the browser, the way Web pages are built, the protocols that tell the browser what to do, the protocols that govern how fast data travels on the Internet, the design of the physical network itself. He also helped establish the W3C’s Web Performance Working Group and co-chairs it. In the past, he helped build the YouTube video serving system and Googlebot.
Sreeram Rmachandran is a Software Engineer at Google. He works on the “Make the web fast” initiative, focusing on awareness and tools to help decrease latency. Prior to this, he worked on improving search quality and ranking at Google. He graduated with a Masters in Computing from the National University of Singapore.
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