The path to a faster loading sequence. Posted by Wiltse Carpenter, Tech Lead, Gmail Performance Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it's something that we think about and work on everyday.
We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster. Gmail's architecture eliminates many of the delays in reading mail by employing techniques like prefetching, but recently we decided to take a close look at some other key parts of Gmail to see if we could speed things up. One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the "Sign in" button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won't resolve every "This is taking longer than usual... " message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we've seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started. We made good progress on every front. Firesheep, a day later - codebutler. This was certainly an interesting day.
As I told TechCrunch: I went back and forth trying to predict what the reaction might be. Initially before Firesheep was completed I thought there might be moderate interest, but then after doing more research found a lot of one-off articles discussing this same issue that were essentially ignored. I certainly never expected Firesheep to be the #10 trending search on Google in the US. Most importantly, I certainly never expected there would be this much attention all at once, and within the first 24 hours. I’ve received a ton of great messages from people who are happy that this issue has finally received widespread attention, so after day one I’m happy with the result.
Since being released just over a day ago, Firesheep has been downloaded over 129,000 times. The first bug reports have started rolling in: The Message of Firesheep: "Baaaad Websites, Implement Sitewide HTTPS Now!" Co-authored by Richard Esguerra The Firesheep Firefox extension has been scaring users across the Internet since its introduction at the Toorcon security conference this past weekend by security researchers Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher.
Firesheep demonstrates a security flaw that the computer security community has been concerned about for years — that any network eavesdropper can take over another user's session (say, a login to a webmail or social networking account) just by sniffing packets and copying the victim's cookie. In other words, if the websites you visit are not taking steps to encrypt your communications, or you're not taking advantage of the encryption they offer, it's now an obvious and trivial fact that anyone else on that same network can use features from your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, and a number of other popular web sites. Since Firesheep is extensible, people will probably teach it to "support" more web sites in short order.
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