Monthly Archives: December 2011

This is why your internet is slow

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I used to think that it was Flash’s fault that ads would load slowly. Now I’m beginning to think it’s also all of these ads + social-sharing with their iframe-within-iframe loading that is really the culprit. How bad is it? Let me literally recount the ways:

This is an ad on a site I happened to be looking at today:

Looks innocent, right? I inspected the source code just because I was curious how the Google Plus overlay was working. That’s when I discovered it was an ad inserted by way of an iframe:

But it gets better. That iframe includes another iframe.

What’s that you say? Can we go deeper? Absolutely! That iframe includes yet another iframe:

And since you’re so patient and want to see the Google Plus button code, let me show you the iframe that’s in that iframe!

4 levels deep. Ridiculous. I can understand why each of those frames is there, however it seems to me that this tends to negate the optimization we do around trying to load scripts and content more efficiently.

Graham Jenkin’s experiences in doing design at Google

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An interesting read: http://grahamjenkin.com/blog/2011/10/getting-good-design-done-in-an-engineering-driven-company-google-wallet.html

“On Wallet, I rarely talked to an engineering manager without expressing my anxiety/excitement/desire to get the product shipped. ‘Look, I don’t care about blablabla, I just want to get the best product shipped as soon as possible.’ “

Also:

“By prototyping and presenting the user experience vision, and getting engineers excited about the prospect of building such a vision, we create the conditions for our vision to become reality. On the flip side, if a user experience is less than adequate, we can use our story-telling powers to raise anxiety about – and action on – the inadequacies.”