Potato gun, lightning, and sonic magic: Google Chrome Speed Tests | Hacker News Reader

Potato gun, lightning, and sonic magic: Google Chrome Speed Tests

chrome.blogspot.com

63 pointsspuz20 comments

How does one find a job doing that? Forget programming, I want to make potato guns to promote what the rest of y'all have done!

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/new-york/mark...

Oh, so I'd have to move to New York :(. I knew it couldn't be all good.

Fascinating! 'Tis healthy to remember that technology can sometimes be used for intriguingly creative but basically useless purposes, and not just for one week a year in the Nevadan desert.

I'm new to HN, read the introduction at http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and found the concept really great but doubted that people really can restrain themselves from posting "funny" or "cool" stuff.

Then I find this. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed that those ambitious goals can't be met or if I'm thankful that someone pointed me at a funny video. Maybe both.

I think that guidelines suggest that it shouldn't only be funny or cute, there has to be something more. In this case it's a pretty clever form of advertising, plus it's related to Google Chrome...

We tend to have this discussion every few days. You will also see the "becoming reddit" thread every once in a while.

The making of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI

Does anyone know the firm that makes all the chrome ads? They're awesome.

I believe Google's communications team produces them.

the group is called Google Creative Labs. see http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/advertising/google-...

BBH New York was involved

This video contains no substance. It's an advertisement (albeit entertaining). Flagged.

Flag silently. (Comments about flagging contain no substance either.)

I'm not quite clear on what's being 'tested' in these videos. The idea is give a practical visual comparison of really, really fast things to google chrome loading a web page.

Because it's so practical, you don't need a tesla coil to duplicate it yourself (and be disappointed). Go to google, search for pandora, and click on the first link. Okay, so clearly they're not talking about transfer/load/rendering times. Let's click refresh. Well that was quite a bit faster, wasn't it? But still no lightning bolt.

Cool video, but I'd be worried that users will be underwhelmed when they test it for themselves...

why do you hate fun?

I don't! I think this video is absolutely awesome, and I deeply, deeply wish that I could trade in my current line of work to make these videos for a living.

That being said, I can't replicate Chrome's load times as seen in that video :)

The tedious parts of the job are left on the (proverbial) cutting room floor. Like construction projects, there's a lot of people just standing around waiting at a shoot.

Refresh often disables the cache, or at least does a bunch of if-modified-since requests. Better to type the url again and hit enter.

Semi-agreed. If you look closely, the mouse pointer (which they use to activate Chrome) is positioned over the "Forward" button in the browser; it looks like they let a page load completely, navigate back to Google, then the speed test is how long it takes to rerender the page from the cache.

Still, totally awesome ad. Loved every second.

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