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by coldpie 4096 days ago
Hahaha. I've been using the new GMaps for ages, and always thought it was fine. So I thought, I'll check out the old one and see how different it really is.

Holy crap it's fast. Wow. There's no loading or giant pixels, zooming is instant, scrolling around is instant. I can't get over how much faster this is. Woof.
1 comments
sp332 4096 days ago
Part of that might be that no one is using those servers anymore.
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leeoniya 4096 days ago
i can tell you, unambiguously, that it has always been this fast. those tilesets are almost certainly statically cached and served at lightning speed with practically 0 overhead from some regionally located cdn server.

server load would have a statistically imperceptible impact here; never seen a google product roll out with scale-related issues, especially one as mature as their gmaps architecture was at the time of the GL switch.

EDIT: the image-based maps is a great example of the "Choose Boring Technology" thread [1]. the benefits of the GL maps, IMO, do not justify the enormous speed sacrifice, at least to the end users. i'm sure google's ultimate plan was/is to merge google earth and "3d/vr/augment all the things!", but for basic maps it is just terrible. i'm really sad about the whole situation because they really have great looking, readable tilesets, much better than OSM (even if less complete). sadly, they never did get the pixel-density-appropriate versions made for mobile devices and all the features looked tiny when implemented using their js maps api :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215

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piker 4096 days ago
Did Google render and cache all tiles on some interval? Otherwise, server load may affect speed if expired tiles are re-rendered.
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jeffasinger 4096 days ago
I think one of the "benefits" of the new version of the maps is that they can more easily customize the output per user.

This means that they can show different businesses to you based on your searches, and possibly some day charge businesses to be "put on the map".

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GauntletWizard 4096 days ago
Sponsored listings and ads in map search are already a thing on mobile. If I search for certain common terms ("Smog Check", for example), some pinpoints are already highlighted differently because they correspond to ads in the search results list.
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