| I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every G+ link is a nightmare. About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL. When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be read. I suspect there is also javascript that times out or fails to gracefully handle failure to load some resources. I've never seen the flashy bling that people were talking about when G+ launched. Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching. To give some idea of how slow it is, I've had a single G+ page loading the entire time I typed this. Still consists of a white-on-white page. I have, in some instances, needed to ssh to a fast remote server, and read G+ via w3m when there was a link I really wanted to read. In contrast, when I click on a HN page, it comes up with very little discernable delay. The rare times I go to facebook, it may take it a minute to come up, but it always loads. Around 5% of the US population still uses dialup. |
The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.