| 1MB club, yeah, that triggered me. Try to open Google Maps, or any Google product webpage for that matter. In Maps, just get to a chosen place and repeatedly zoom in to the maximum and then zoom out to see a few countries (or US states). The best is to click on + and - buttons so that you're sure the area and zoom ratio is the same. Observe network requests. Many requests are in range 1-20 bytes, but they send 800 bytes in request headers and cookies. Cookies? Really? For a static image (map tile) or a supporting JSON? Do they have to be that long? Are those requests really necessary? Also look at the length of URL. Is it really required to send that much crap? And there are thousands of those requests, only some of them get cached. And there's a grid that blinks now and then, especially when those buttons "restaurants", "hotels" etc. Compare that to OpenStreetMap which is way leaner and smoother (and now, after changing maps color scheme by Google, much nicer and more professionally looking), and works flawlessly with Firefox, too. Google could substantially reduce the maps servers' load, and the network load, but their "top talent" programmers just made it heavyweight and ugly by design. They're against all web best practices they require others to follow. Is all that crap required to spy users, or is it because of their programmers are way overrated? Look at the enormous amount of requests to www.google.com/log204 and /gen_204. There can be several of them for one display of map in a specific place at a specific zoom rate. Each of them is about 680 bytes, of which 500 is the GET request, rest is headers (+ cookie, of course!) And I need to mention that my mobile data transfer plan gets depleted much faster than it could have if this product was properly developed (yeah I often use maps on my laptop with mobile internet plans). Not everybody sits in a colorful office having 1- or 10Gbps fiber internet connection and nicely stuffed microkitchen. |
I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds the new colour scheme for Google maps horrendous.