华尔街日报说，有机构对 Facebook的 Instant Articles做了对比测试，其下载速度的确快于一般的媒体网站。当然，其中的缘由，值得玩味。原因之一：偷跑，“pre-loaded”。在技术与技术带来的速度方面，网上媒体，尤其是传统媒体的网上媒体，的确被甩在几条大街之后。
Facebook’s Instant Articles Do Speed Up Mobile Content
When it comes to loading times, Facebook’s Instant Articles appear to be living up to their name.
Earlier this month, the social network launched its new Instant Articles product, which allows publishers to host articles and videos directly on its service to be viewed on Apple iOS devices. One of the benefits of the product, according to Facebook, is that it enables content to load faster on mobile devices than publishers’ own websites do.
Early data suggest Facebook might be right.
According to Web performance monitoring firm Catchpoint Systems, for example, Instant Articles content loads significantly faster than the sites of major news publishers.
The company analyzed the load times of the homepages of 50 major online news publishers during a two-hour period Thursday and found they clocked in at an average of 3.66 seconds.
Facebook’s Instant Articles, meanwhile, do in fact appear to load nearly instantly. The Instant Articles analyzed by Catchpont Systems loaded on average between 0 milliseconds and 300 milliseconds; much faster than publishers’ own sites.
The reason?
Much of the content for Facebook-hosted articles has already been “pre-loaded” before the user even taps on the article they’re trying to reach. Also, Facebook has figured out a way to load other objects such as ads into pages in a way that doesn’t disrupt access to the content itself.
“Facebook has done a lot of work optimizing its mobile app for users. Now they’re bringing that to publishers,” said Dritan Suljoti, co-founder and chief product officer of Catchpoint Systems.
The challenge for online publishers is to deliver a great experience for their users in a way that also extracts revenue from them. That often means having ads, social buttons, and other background code that significantly slows down the loading times of their Webpages.
Bloated pages cause slow loading times, especially in mobile, Mr. Suljoti explained.
The advantage Facebook has, however, is not only the ability to pre-load content in the background, but also to load ads, images and other content in a more efficient manor.
“Facebook can be smarter in its app than publishers can in a browser,” Mr. Suljoti said.
