Google wants to make the Web faster. As well as optimizing its own
sites and services to run at blazing speed, the company has been helping
to streamline the rest of the Web, too. Now Google has released free
software that could make many sites load twice as fast.
The software, called mod_pagespeed, can be installed and configured
on Apache Web servers, the most commonly used software for running
websites. Once installed, mod_pagespeed determines ways to optimize a
site's performance on the fly. For example, it will compress images more
efficiently and change settings so that more of the pages are stored in
a user's browser cache, so that the same data doesn't have to be loaded
repeatedly. The software will be automatically updated, notes Richard
Rabbat, product manager for the new project. He says that this means
that as Google and others make improvements, people who install it will
benefit without having to make any changes.