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Information Technology News Google Desktop for Windows gets faster, and safer
Information Technology News Google Desktop for Windows gets faster, and safer | Google Desktop for Windows gets faster, and safer |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 17 September 2008 | |
  
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Writing on Google's official blog site, Jói Sigurðsson, tech lead, Google Desktop for Windows, said: "We love getting your feedback, and one of the themes that has cropped up in the Google Desktop Help group is that you want a lighter, faster product. We heard the message loud and clear and decided that the Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows release would be based entirely on performance. "In true Google fashion, we took a data-driven approach: Measure, then analyse, fix the most important issues and lowest hanging fruit, then rinse, lather and repeat. First, we built performance tests that simulate a typical user's behaviour when using Google Desktop and measure the time spent on actions such as starting up, shutting down, searching, adding a gadget, adding a new document to the search index, and so forth." Sigurðsson said that this performance measurement system had "enabled us to discover some seemingly small changes that had a major impact on performance. We've been able to immediately fix changes that decreased performance, and learn from changes that improved performance. "For example, we found a way to cut memory usage during startup by about 50; shutdown now happens five times faster, and we were able to avoid a seemingly innocuous state that would have almost doubled startup time." He added: "We realized that with the hundreds of Google Desktop Gadgets available from third parties, there is always the possibility that one of them performs badly. To help you deal with this, we added a system that detects when a gadget is causing your computer to perform poorly, and asks you whether to remove the gadget "While we were at it, we added proactive security measures that prevent malicious gadgets from stealing information from other gadgets, and we made changes that allow Flash programs such as interactive games to be embedded in gadgets; for certain types of gadgets this can be a lighter weight approach than previously possible." |
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