In an effort to make Chrome faster, Google developers are working on a new mode to reduce the impact of a website on browser performance. The current implementation seems to be detrimental to the functionality of most websites.
With Chrome, Google has had the ambition since day one to offer a very fast browser. Although Chrome itself is getting faster year after year, you have more bandwidth available than ever and PCs are also gaining in strength, the internet doesn’t seem to be any easier to access than it used to be. That’s because websites have grown along with it. They are more complex, run more code, offer heavier images that slows down the browser again.
With an experimental never-slow mode, Google wants to do something about these speed problems. The mode approach is interesting, and it is unclear how Google sees the implementation work in practice. After all, Never-slow imposes a limited performance budget on sites and limits a number of frequently used functions. For example, a site may not load more than 2 MB of images, scripts running longer than 200 ms will be stopped, and synchronous XMLHttpRequests will be blocked.
Limited budget
Each site receives a budget according to the above rules, and that budget is reset every time the user interacts. For example, if you scroll or click, the site in question may retrieve another 2MB of images.
In practice, a website will run out of budget before all code has been executed, after which Chrome will call a halt, and the site in question will be ugly at best and unusable at worst. Google is aware of this itself: in the notas accompanying the experimental code we read Warning: can destroy content in silence.
The code is in the prototype phase and will probably change a lot before we ever see it in a functional browser. However, the path Google chooses is interesting. We wonder how such an approach can ever work unless Google can convince developers to build a light-alternative for every website. We don’t think that’s realistic.
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This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.