According to a new Chromium blog postone of Google’s core 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 statistics on the performance and quality of web pages, giving developers actionable insights for improvements.
Today, Google says 40% of sites meet these metrics, resulting in more responsive web browsing experiences.
Google says its work sped up the Internet
After surveying “millions” of web pages to determine a public standard for what Google considers fast, easy-to-use pages, the company’s developers set out to design tools and metrics like “Largest Contentful Paint,” which measures when the user actually uses the pages sees the contents of a page.
About 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 more than 10,000 years of waiting for web pages to load and more than 1,200 years of waiting for web pages to respond to user input.
By the end of the year, Chrome’s developers hope that about 69% of sites will meet Core Web Vitals, compared to 64% for mobile and 67% for desktop.
The browser also received a series of updates earlier this year, including a memory saving mode designed to improve efficiency on devices with slower and older hardware, and a power saver to help extend laptop battery life.
Users who want to gain some control over their resource usage can now hover over an open tab to see how much memory it is using, allowing them to make more informed decisions about pausing and closing activities.