Redfin map page now lighter
Yesterday the Microsoft Virtual Earth team released a new version of Local.live.com and a new version of their API. What is most exciting for us is that Microsoft started to compress with GZIP the v4 version of the map control which is the one we use on the Redfin site. This means that the Microsoft map control went from 435KB to 103KB; a big savings for users visiting our map page for the first time or for users whose map control needs to be re-downloaded (approximately once every 48 hours according to the caching rules set by Microsoft.)
As a reference the Google control is 54KB compressed.