HTTP Intermediary Layer From Google Could Dramatically Speed Up the Web

The quickest way for a 'dramatic' speedup of the web is to install an ad blocker.<p>Also, 'dramatic' speedups will only lead to pages that get loaded up with more junk.<p>If that had not happened we'd already have an extremely fast browsing experience. It's like memory and disk space, if the budget increases then there will be some way to spend that budget.<p>If web pages load in under one second they'll be 'improved' until they load in 3 to 4 seconds again.<p>spdy:// ? I don't think so.<p>Let's drop some of that flash and turn on gzip compression (if you haven't done that already) and make sure your cache headers are set properly.<p>That alone will probably give you a 50% boost.

Out of interest I downloaded the page with curl, then stripped out the JS and other stuff, leaving mostly just formatting and text.<p><pre><code> Before: 178845 bytes After : 33604 bytes </code></pre> That's just the page, and doesn't include images or ads, but it does include the text of the comments.<p>Just an observation.

Compressing http content also means extra processing on both the client and the server side. While this might not be as noticeable on a PC, for mobile phones it sure can be a concern. It will be interesting to see some data on it.

Wow. A slashdot link in many months on HN. Telling.