March 18, 2011

Google accelerates Adsense

by Jan Harris

Google has made web pages load more quickly through improvements to its Adsense advertising platform.

Changes to show_ads.js, the JavaScript code used to display ads on web pages, mean that contextual ads load more quickly in the background.

The improvement has been achieved from embedding the heavy lifting of the script in an iframe.

This means that the browser doesn’t stall while the Javascript identifies which ads to display.

Effectively the changes meant that pages displaying Adsense ads now load just as quickly as pages without ads.

Web developers will not need to make any changes themselves to benefit from speedier load times as show_ads will automatically update.

Initially the changes will be applied to Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 as further tests are needed before other browsers are supported.