According to a new Chromium blog post, one of Google's central web products has saved users more than 10,000 years of waiting for pages to load this year alone.
The product in question – Core Web Vitals – was launched three years ago to provide metrics about the performance and quality of web pages, in turn giving developers actionable insights for improvements.
Today, Google says that 40% of sites pass these metrics, resulting in more responsive web browsing experiences.
Google says its work has sped up the web
After examining “millions” of web pages to determine a public standard for what Google considers to be fast, user-friendly pages, the company’s developers went on to design tools and metrics like ‘Largest Contentful Paint’, which measures when the user actually sees a page’s content.
Around a year later, in August 2021, Google updated its search ranking algorithms to include some of these considerations.
As a result of the added pressure on sites to perform better, Google says the project has saved users over 10,000 years of waiting for web pages to load and over 1,200 years of waiting for web pages to respond to user input.
By the end of the year, Chrome’s developers hope that around 69% of sites will meet Core Web Vitals, up from 64% for mobile and 67% for desktop.
The browser also got a series of updates earlier this year, including a memory-saving mode designed to improve efficiency on devices with slower and older hardware, and an energy saver to help prolong the battery life of laptops.
Now, users looking to take some control over their usage of resources can hover over an open tab to reveal how much memory it’s using in order to make more informed decisions about pausing and closing activity.
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