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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
“I feel the need… the need for speed!”
For anyone (like myself) who has been religiously following Google and the amazing things that they have done to improve people’s experience on the web, you would have noticed a pattern in December 2009 of “speed.” The reasons for their speed obsession are clearly justified; a user’s experience on the web is made or broken by the speed at which they are able to browse, including the initial page load, the responsiveness of the interactive components, and the number of clicks to get to retrieve their desired information.
As such, Google has been busy releasing various tools to help with user’s experiences on the web:
Ok, so this technically came out for Windows in 2008, but was released fully cross-platform in 2009. Chrome (and its subsequent big brother “Chrome OS”) is an open-source browser that borrows components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox (both open-source projects) and aims to “add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” As of January 4, 2010, Chrome had officially passed Apple’s Safari browser to become the 3rd most popular browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox.
As Twitter has grown in popularity, it has quickly become the first source for breaking news, mostly due to the ease and speed with which you can post information. In Q4 2009, Google signed a deal with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and FriendFeed (among others) to allow search results from each of their sites to be propagated into the Google search result page. The benefit of this is that one can get to-the-second results of what they’re looking for — all in one place.
While improving the end-users’ tools can greatly improve usability and performance, Google acknowledged that individual site optimization is key to a successful user experience by releasing a variety of webmaster tools to help web developers identify slow parts of their site, and provide tips on how to improve those areas. One group of tools was added to Google Analytics under the new “Site Performance” section, that gives an analysis of your site’s performance relative to the rest of the web, as well as particular suggestions on improving page speed. This is particularly helpful in identifying over-arching tips and tricks that can improve the loading speed of your site as a whole.
The second tool is a Firefox extension called “Page Speed” that takes the analysis provided in the “Site Performance” section, and moves it to the browser, allowing you to view specific recommendations on a page-by-page basis. This is particularly helpful in identifying very specific ways to improve the speed of a particular page that might be loading slower than others on your site.
The third tool is a Chrome extension called “Speed Tracer.” This tool is more geared towards the performance of web applications, focusing less on the initial load time, and more on the strain that using the website itself puts on the user’s browser. Using Speed Tracer, you can pinpoint exactly what scripts, actions, or files are causing your website to appear to slow down.
The
nerdiestmost technical tool that Google announced was their hosting of a Public DNS server. DNS, or Domain Name System, is an essential part of the web that helps translate domain names (”blog.centresource.com”) into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers where the website files live. By providing a Public DNS, Google plans to not only optimize the hundreds of DNS requests that the average user makes every day, but also to gather data about user’s browsing patterns “to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.”
