Gmail’s Secret: Preloading Before You Sign In
45sReveals a clever, behind-the-scenes optimization trick that feels like a magic hack, sparking curiosity and shareability.
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When I worked on the Gmail team, you know what they did? When you typed [music] in your email address, even before you've entered in your password, the probability once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in is extremely high. So, why not just start loading your account in the background? [music] Not not like sending it down to the desktop, that would be a security issue, but like loaded into memory on the server.
Like, get it ready and prepare it. >> [music] >> I just thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive. I was like, "Mike, why don't we just do that? But like, we'll just upload the photo and like, assume >> [music] >> you're going to upload the photo." So, what ended up happening was people would caption their >> [music] >> photo, they'd press done or upload, and you'd see this little progress bar just go It was lightning fast,
okay? [music] We were no faster than anyone else at the time, but by choosing 512 by 512 [music] and doing it in the background, it almost guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned.