Whilst in Indonesia I was subjected to some horrifically slow
connections. Although I was only ever on WiFi, connection speeds were
on par with 2G/Edge connection.
Whilst searching the web, I saw various results (including Tripadvisor
and Wikipedia) labelled as being slow to load. When clicked I was
redirected to a product called Google Web Light [1] that had a link to
the original site and used 80% less data.
As a consumer, taking off my Wikimedia hat, I actually appreciated
this experience for Wikipedia. When I clicked view original the
process was so painfully slow I eventually found myself just living
with it as it didn't devoid me of any activities as a reader (at the
time connection was so slow editing just wasn't on my mind). For sites
such as tripadvisor and
hotels.com the experience was so bad, to look
things up I ended up always switching to the original. This was more
annoying as I was unable to find some global opt out for the entire
site.
To crudely describe what the weblight experience does:
1) It loads just lead content
2) It strips lots of styles and some JS but not all JavaScript (for
instance main menu works)
3) IT throws away features such as search, editing, talk pages, category
4) It bundles all links into the left menu accessible by the hamburger
I took some screenshots of the experience [2] - you can see the
content is available but not well styled - it's how I'd imagine an AMP
experience of Wikipedia to look like and you can play around with it
yourself [3].
To summarise what this means to us:
Google are making it possible for users with slow connections to get
to our content
... thus various traffic never hits our servers.
... those users cannot edit.
(although on plus side they do see our fundraising banners :-))
We can opt out of this experience via headers but right now I strongly
believe we have to improve the speed of our offering.
I think this is in reach and will be a subject at the dev summit in
various forms.
The reading team has been experimenting in ways to optimise our page
content by using Parsoid [3] specifically to explore how we can
optimise views to HTML heavy pages such as Barack Obama. I'm looking
forward to sharing results.
[1]
https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack
Obama
[2]
http://imgur.com/a/dO4wt
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Reading/Web/Projects/Barack_Oba…