Everyone hates slow-loading websites. Google is now looking to make it easier to identify such websites and, in the process, push website owners to improve page load times. Google Chrome is testing a way to identify and label slow-loading websites. Such websites will be appropriately labelled in the future.
Google said it started the project to "to help users understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites delivering fast experiences".
It said it was working on metrics that could spot when sites are "authored" in a way that makes them slow generally. The quirks of many web technologies make it easy for developers to code pages so they take a long time to appear.
In addition, pages are often slow to load because they are waiting for responses from off-site resources such as ad networks, social media widgets or code that analyses user behaviour.
Indicators could include text that says a page "usually loads slow" or might change the colour of a progress bar to hint that the page is a laggard.
In the blog, Chrome engineers said its plan to identify sites would be refined over time and was designed to improve the way websites were created.
"We are being very mindful with our approach to setting the bar for what is considered a good user experience and hope to land on something that is practically achievable by all developers.
Badging will identify whether a website has been authored in a way that makes it slow to load,, with the help of historical load latencies. It will later be expanded to include identifying when a page is likely to load slowly because of your internet connection or device.
Apart from this, Google has also revealed what's in store for Chrome soon along with a number of developer-focussed updates. The company also unveiled a preview of an API, called Web Bundles, that allows developers to distribute content across multiple formats.
