Google wants to make the Web faster

As reported in Network World and on the official Google Blog, Google’s been talking about ways to make the Web, as a whole, faster. Quoth the Google:

Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone.

Typically, as far as computing is concerned, we’ve seen a trend that protocols and languages that were invented in the past were lightweight, compact fast models which ran on the past’s older hardware, replaced by more robust, but slower programs. WordPerfect 5.1 blazed on 286s, while the minimum requirements for Microsoft Office 2007 are 500MHz at the minimum. Yet, I think most people would choose Microsoft Office 2007 over WordPerfect 5.1.

But on the Internet, which requires more so than any other computer endeavor, standards, we have not seen a whole lot of this. TCP has developed a few variations, but mostly remains the same protocol invented in 1974, 1995’s HTML 2.0 code still works 15 years later on today’s javascript-enabled browsers.

By speeding up the Web, Google is pushing for faster adoption of new standards, such as HTML 5, designed to bring multimedia applications away from plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java, and towards putting it into the interpreted HTML code itself. In fact, and this is pure speculation, creating a viable alternative to the Flash near-monopoly on Web multimedia would foster Google’s standing compared to their competitors – and maybe that’s why the announcment, which come down to: “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a faster way of doing things,” was worth Google making a big deal.

(An interesting sidenote: with the proprietary Flash, we wait on Adobe to make improvements to the code; with HTML 5 an open standard, code improvements would occur according to the standards association. I have no idea which would actually produce faster code improvements, but I do know that I’d rather code multimedia for free than pay Adobe for the Flash application.)

Protocols such as TCP/IP were invented at a time when bandwidth was much scarcer than it is now. Newer protocols which can better take advantage of more bandwidth are a natural evolution. “Less bandwidth used,” after all, doesn’t mean “better performance” just as no one will consider Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS running on 256k RAM more productive than Office 2007 running on 2GB.

Client computers – even the itty bitty ones we keep in our pockets, like Blackberries and iPhones – have become much more powerful since the days of yore, when dragons roamed the earth and wore Unix beards. One of the reasons that multimedia has grown so well on the Web over the past decade is because we now have computers that can handle more complex and more powerful tasks on the client-side. That is, there could be no YouTube HD if our computers couldn’t handle high definition video playback. There would be no Ajax, if JavaScript interpretation taxed our machines.

I do think it’s time for change in Internet standards. Then again, when is it not time for change in Internet standards? If you can measure the change in performance, and it’s a clear improvement over the old system, do it.