Google+ is certainly fast, I just wish it were quicker about showing me valid/updated state.<p>I've never used any website where the data I was seeing was so obviously out of date across the board as it is on Google+. Yes, eventually it coalesces towards correctness, but I don't think this model works well for things like notifications and such.<p>"Oh look I have a new notification... oh wait, no I don't, that's from like an hour ago and I already looked at it."<p>Speed <i>is</i> a feature, but so is not making your users think your software is just plain buggy and too much local state caching is basically indistinguishable from a bug for many users.. and in many contexts it can also be annoying even for those who know roughly why it is happening.
"On a side note, you may have noticed that we load our CSS via a XHR instead of a style tag - that is not for optimization reasons, that’s because we hit Internet Explorer’s max CSS selector limit per stylesheet!"<p>Can anyone go into more detail about what they're talking about here? I didn't realize IE had a "CSS selector limit." Seems like a funny thing to mention when you're talking about how optimized your site is.
The little red box that shows how many notifications, is anything but fast...<p>Edit: It reminds me of the eBay motors data we got a few weeks ago. A lot of it is making the page appear to be loading (i.e. flush the buffer for 'above the fold' and then ajax everything else in)
I'm rather more grateful for all the work Google have done here after using Diaspora; the one thing that nags me about that more than anything is how much slower than G+ or Facebook it is. A couple of seconds on each click really breaks the whole experience.
There's a major downside to all of this complexity, however, because it degrades really poorly: I routinely see 30+ second page loads in Google Plus because they load a ton of code and you won't see anything until it completes 80-130 requests (warm/cold cache respectively) to load almost 5MB of resources! An ugly, non-interactive 1994-style simple HTML page would be far more useful to me at such times…<p>In practice, this happens to me multiple times a day on a normal connection and more frequently on congested or hotel crappy WiFi.
Is this also why the new Google Reader is so slow (they're using a more general framework that doesn't match the old Reader's performance when rapidly paging through article previews)?