18 ms·

Moving towards a faster web

245 points by joeyespo 7y ago

zadokshi 7y ago
This will give developers leverage to ask for time to optimise, upgrade, and improve things they are not normally allowed to work on, as it will raise the discussion to the level of managers and the general public. However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type configurations faster out of the box? If it is possible to speed up the default config of most websites on the internet, perhaps there is an easy win to be had.
- moreira 7y ago
  > However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type configurations faster out of the box? I'm pretty sure that most slow websites aren't slow because their server-side rendering takes a long time. This seems to be mostly a front-end oriented thing (especially directed at pages that load MBs of JS); basically if the page doesn't adhere to all the front-end optimisation guidelines.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    The slowness described in the article isn't jank, but time-to-initial-load. Conceivably the initial client-side render could take a nontrivial amount of time, but in the vast majority of cases - just like for server-side rendering - it isn't a deciding factor. The real deciding factor is the amount of dependencies that have to be loaded. This includes JS, but usually the JS for ads/tracking is far larger than the JS for the actual UI, even on fully client-side-rendered sites.
- acdha 7y ago
  PHP and MySQL are pretty fast out of the box - and have been for a couple decades (a single server was well into hundreds requests per second by 2000). What’s slow are the frameworks on top of them, and a lot of that is going to require big changes since things like the WordPress plugin world or most of the JavaScript world have not had a great culture about monitoring and optimizing things. Simply moving this into the category of problems you can’t ignore would be positive - along with tracking data usage for mobile users on metered plans.
tarjei 7y ago
I hope they roll out good monitoring tools for website owner for these features - i.e not a tool to test your site but a tool to tell you what google reports to it's users about the site. Otherwise you can be fooled by running lighthouse against your local server and never see the "this site loads slowly" message...
ipython 7y ago
This reads to me as an attempt from Google to further balkanize the web. This looks a lot like the "blue bubbles" effect from Apple iMessage. Did Google run out of actual features to implement? How about reacting to real user concerns such as controlling the privacy of their personal data on the web? Rhetorical question, I know...
- lkbm 7y ago
  Speaking as a real user, let me assure you that website speed definitely falls under real user concerns. I don't know how much I'd use this indicator, but loading speed matters to me. Loading speed matters a lot. This won't win me back from Firefox, but I don't consider it a bad move.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - taeric 7y ago
    You know what loads fast? Web pages. What doesn't? User tracking applications that happen to host some content. :(
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      If you are against user tracking, great, you've got many on your side. But what loads fast is web pages that are made to load fast. If they are able to load fast despite user tracking (which is entirely possible), then it is simply a different issue, and this should not be flagging them as slow. If they are flagged, it should be by something different. If Google is going to implement this (which I support in general because so many sites are painfully slow because there aren't enough incentives to make them fast), what they should be measuring is speed of loading, independent of whether it is slow because of user tracking, slow because the developers do other obnoxious stuff (fill it with click bait images, have videos autoplay, etc), use frameworks sloppily, put too much contents on the page, have a high res background image or video, have a crappy server or use a slow backend language, or whatever it is. While Google does a lot of user tracking, I think the normal way they do it is actually pretty fast. Fault them for user tracking, but if they are able to allow site owners show Google ads without slowing down the page load significantly, don't lump them in with all these other ones that both track users, as well as make the site a painful user experience.
monkpit 7y ago
I feel like this will get a lot of flak from HN users, but I think this will overall be a benefit to the user experience on all browsers, not just chrome.
reustle 7y ago
> Your website seems slow, try speeding it up with AMP today!
- pcora 7y ago
  I used to hate AMP with my guts. But to be honest, usually when I tried to avoid or loaded the site instead of AMP, I get presented with a worse experience in a bloated web-site, whereas when I click on the AMP version, it loads immediately. So now I don't care anymore. But google is not my main search engine, so I less very little of it.
- mlinksva 7y ago
  To save others a search, this text is not in the original post.
- maaaats 7y ago
  I'm thinking the same, this willbe used somehow to push more users into Google's walled garden. Amp is like ten times as slow for me.. Firefox on android, a bug in amp makes the pages not scrollable. Have to press the tiny little icon in the top right, then again press the url, and then wait for the page to load an additional time.
graphememes 7y ago
Who watches the watchmen?
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Mozilla?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I hope they won't whitelist their own pages from this. Maybe then they'll notice Google's own products have a performance problem.
- neogodless 7y ago
  Gmail Loading... Usually loads slow.
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    I think the "Usually loads slow" warning shown in the article is grammatically incorrect. Shouldn't it say "Usually loads slowly"?
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Came to say this. It seems as though a browser of chrome's scale ought to spell-check before cutting a release?
      - nvrspyx 7y ago
        I'm going to be a little nitpicky here: This would be grammar checking, not spell checking. "Slow" is spelled correctly, it's just not the right word (adjective vs adverb). This also seems to still be in the experimentation phase and is not released as far as I can tell and may never actually make it into Chromium based on: > In the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging. This may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users. Regardless, I agree. This probably should've been caught early.
        wruza 7y ago
        Maybe they used adjectives instead of adverbs because it’s both ad-words and they can no longer feel the difference.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Generally, I can tell when a website is loading slowly because it, well, takes a long time to load. Am I misunderstanding what Google is trying to do? I'm not seeing the use case.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  It might make more sense to work it into their search engine. However, it might be nice if it makes some sort of objective measure.
- mlinksva 7y ago
  If the progress bar is green and a site is loading slowly, you're having an anomalous experience, be patient? If blue, expected, maybe give up and don't visit again? That's my impression.
- andybak 7y ago
  Erm. How do you tell that before you click?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    The screenshot in TFA shows a Google slow site warning after a link to the site has been clicked.
    - andybak 7y ago
      Ah. I hadn't actually looked at TFA.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  > Am I misunderstanding what Google is trying to do? I'm not seeing the use case. They're trying to normalize Google's approval process on users so that they can leverage this feature for a profit.
reaperducer 7y ago
Google Capone: "Hey, nytimes.com, your site loads awful slow. We're gonna have to put this badge of shame on it for everyone to see. Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through us, I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically disappear..."
- sneak 7y ago
  I think you misspelled AMP.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through us, I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically disappear... My experience with everything google has touched lately suggest that this wouldn't improve speed any. Gmail and youtube make continental drift look speedy and even the search page takes 1.4MB and takes over a second to load for me (maybe corporate network issue), that's approaching the size of doom to display a dozen links. Google doesn't have any moral authority when it comes to bloat. Edit - for reference HN takes about the same time to load, but that has to cross the pacific ocean whereas google supposedly has local data centers.
  - alttag 7y ago
    There's a big difference between "done loading" and "appears to be done loading". Google is reportedly very cautious about the latter, and pulls some hijinks to appear faster than it is. Frankly, I'd be happier if more sites paid a similar level of attention. That said, if your search page takes over a second, you're right, it might be an issue with your network.
  - BLKNSLVR 7y ago
    I think the point being made is that it's no longer actually about the speed, it's about the 'badge of shame'. The analogy being used is accurate, in that 'protection money' isn't, and was never, about protection.
  - Avamander 7y ago
reaperducer 7y ago
Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed. We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google. Exactly what does "high-quality experiences" mean? Penalize sites with bad colors? Sites that are artsy and an algorithm can't understand? Sites that have been repositories of information for longer than Google has been around? Sites that don't meet Google's worldview? That disagree with Google's politics?
- rlv-dan 7y ago
  "Quality" should be reserved for the content and its usefulness. Speed is not a quality factor. It's a convenience.
Lammy 7y ago
This page doesn't contain any body text unless I run their Javascript. Is that supposed to be faster?
sakisv 7y ago
While I appreciate fast loading sites as much as anyone, there's something I appreciate even more: getting to the content as fast as possible. It's becoming increasingly common to have all sorts of pop-ups blocking a big part of the screen at best or adding an overlay across the entire body. If only I knew that my click would result in that kind of monstrosity I wouldn't have clicked in the first place. So maybe it would be more useful to show an of how many things we need to close before we get to the content. I think that something like this would also help get us to "a faster web".
- robbrown451 7y ago
  They say "Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed. We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google" That seems to cover such things.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I'm worried that their definition of "high-quality experiences" will be the same one as typically used in UX on the web - i.e. how much money did the users ultimately made the site, and not whether they actually had a good time.
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      I understand a lot of the distrust of Google her one HN, but I also don't think that would be their style. To me, the sites done with Google ads aren't the ones that are the problem, then tend to load fast and not put a bunch of crap in your face. Yeah they track you and such, not denying that or supporting that, but Google generally pushes back against the sort of bad experience you find at so many sites.
- musicale 7y ago
  So many sites load 8MB of garbage, often from dozens of domains, just to display 8KB of text. Then as soon as you try to start reading, an obnoxious pop-up window appears, demanding that you sign up for their spam list. These are anti-patterns that need to go away.
sgt101 7y ago
Pages are made of 30 sites, more. This is what makes the experience shit, and Google are bang up responsible. The architecture of the web did not, and does not, include this - the business model that is sustained by it exploits the web, it does not support it.
davidgerard 7y ago
Ad blockers speed up the web quite a bit! Pity about that for Chrome, hey.
X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
There's a concern over pushing AMP & their ads. I totally get that, but so far the recommendations that they link to aren't directly related to either: % curl https://web.dev/fast/ 2> /dev/null | grep -I amp Terms & Privacy </a>, and code samples are licensed under the
jjcm 7y ago
To me this is better than amp - give me clear messaging around a site's performance rather than mandating a platform that gives the site less control. I certainly worry that there's the potential to abuse this, and I also wonder if Google's own sites (i.e. amp pages) will be biased. To their credit they're showing one of Google's own pages as being slow in the example, but I'd be interested in seeing a 3rd party analysis of what pages are considered slow and which aren't. Another part of me worries that this will lead to a cobra effect[1], where people optimize a page's first load so Chrome says the page is fast, while withholding the main content of the page for a delayed load, leading to even more site bloat. Identifying when a page has actually loaded will be tricky. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  See my other comment about how our metrics are designed to capture various milestones in the loading experience. I think it’s already harder to game a good Performance score than you might imagine, and it’s only going to get harder over time as the web platform collectively gets better at metrics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477
butz 7y ago
I prefer Firefox's way of "moving towards a faster web" - blocking trackers.
- kome 7y ago
  Indeed, it's so much more effective and it has immediate real results. Also: it's not a "police state" approach. Google loves a good police state.
ycombonator 7y ago
“ Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed.“ My speculation is that they are gearing towards web moderation. Tag sites that don’t agree with their world view as “potentially harmful”. This could make an average chrome user immediately balk at opening the site and reading the content. Before you downvote my comment explain why the above scenario is not plausible.
- Conlectus 7y ago
  Google search has defined itself by being the way people access the web, and already has heavy antitrust pressure put on it but the EU for related reasons. Extending that would go against their stated world view, and more importantly raise even more regulatory concerns. This situation differs from eg. YouTube because they do not themselves host the content, and are not subject to copyright laws related to it. Also: Google is made of human beings who have already protested against, for example, censoring Google within China.
Endy 7y ago
The best way to have a faster web is to get rid of Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AMP, "web assembly", WebDRM, ECMAScript (and all derivatives), and go back to only loading text and images from a blind server to a user-agent entirely defined by the wishes of the specific user. But all the stuff that makes the Web slow and pointless to use is how Alphabet makes money. So as long as you drink the Google-Aid, you're doomed to a slow web of garbage.
- shantly 7y ago
  Bingo. We patted ourselves on the back for killing the worst annoyances of the web (pop-ups, terrible Flash menus that were always some different, cute thing for every site, big, slow, Applets—god, those would feel responsive and light compared to even a "lean" modern "Web App") but kept a scripting language with enough power to re-create all of that, and worse. The fix is getting rid of it. We won't. Web UX is gonna generally be trash until we get rid of or reign in (esp. remove ability to make requests without user interaction, and remove ability to listen for most events) Javascript. Which, again, won't happen. So Web UX—in practice, as seen in the wild, not what a developer may make to demo light web development or what certain niche sites may do—is doomed to be terrible.
- roca 7y ago
  A fine way to make sure that users need Windows, iOS or Android to run most applications, and that desktop Linux is completely useless.
- jamesgeck0 7y ago
  Webmail was terrible back when every single click required a fetching a new page load. Even on a reasonably fast DSL connection, JavaScript Gmail is noticeably more snappy than HTML Gmail. Pre-ajax online maps? Almost unusable. I certainly wouldn't want to return to those days.
  - Endy 7y ago
    Yes, because you're asking a client for text and images downloaded from a server to do things it was never intended to. When you start employing torturous misuse, you're going to find the tool unsuited to the job. You can use a pipe wrench as a makeshift hammer, but a sledgehammer can't tighten a nut (more than once). Use an email and newsreader for email. Use a full mapping suite to download specialized map data. Don't force a web browser to shim into those niche jobs. Old adage I learned with computers: Do One Thing, Well. That's what each program should be. One thing.
forgotmypw3 7y ago
The web is already pretty fast if you don't put too much stuff into your webpages.
- tpmx 7y ago
  ️:) Yeah, pretty much. If web sites would stop stuffing these giant js frameworks pages + 3 trackers + 3 ad networks into all page we could be using like iPhone 4 now.
danShumway 7y ago
One of the regular complaints I've pushed against AMP is that it's a hamfisted way to address page speed. Search placement should be determined by generic speed tests, not by forcing developers to use Google's technology. This looks to me like a positive effort. I'm not thrilled with overlays like this, and I'm not thrilled with baking this kind of stuff into the browser. It feels over-engineered and weird. But, I think it's a better direction than AMP. There are a lot of ways this could go bad, but very cautious thumbs up from me.
saagarjha 7y ago
This kind of effort sounds great, but the issue is that Google has already spent their goodwill on improving the web in this area. Who can trust the company to implement this fairly? Will Gmail get a “badge of shame” (it surely deserves one)? Will websites that are fast but don’t use AMP or the new Google hotness be ranked as they should? There are a lot of questions that I’m sure many have already answered in their head based on Google’s past efforts.
vkizl 7y ago
Reddit is going to earn this so fast lol
ThrowAway54769 7y ago
FE devs don’t care about end users. Their sites are slow to load(TheVerge.com), are absolute trash to use (TechCrunch.com) and display an utter lack of concern of compute resources(Lifehacker.com - let you phone idle on this page a few minutes and feel how hot it gets). FE devs want to be taken seriously, but they refuse to learn the lessons the rest of us have already learned. If FE devs would get their crap together we wouldn’t see posts about Google trying to wrest as much control as possible away from them.
- lllr_finger 7y ago
  I have only my anecdotal experience, but when I did full stack work at two large employers HN readers would definitely recognize, we had some really talented developers, and nearly every poorly performing part of a page was dictated by a product owner. The business can't easily and explicitly monetize "fast" to the same degree it can bloated features and ads/tracking.
  - ThrowAway54769 7y ago
    Sorry, but there’s no way anyone can completely blame the POs on this mess.
- vkizl 7y ago
  Amen brother. The day frontend developers stop acting like toddlers, then they will be treated like adults.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "FE" == "front end", as in front-end Web development, for the confused.
syphilis2 7y ago
Maybe Mozilla can add something like this to Firefox, but for websites that break when using adblockers.
esotericn 7y ago
I'm on a slow connection. This page took a good while to load. 100kB of JS, 100kB of fonts. The images get a pass. There's jQuery in there. It's a blog post. wat? Just send me the text.
fenwick67 7y ago
Can someone explain the point of this for the user? As a user, I already know if the page is loading slowly.
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  You might not know why. Is it just a slow site, or is your connection failing you?
dpau 7y ago
> We... hope to land on something that is practically achievable by all developers. There are a LOT of people who have websites that depend upon software that they don't directly control, best example might be Wordpress users with plugins. I myself have built a number of hobby websites that I just don't have time to figure out how to update based on Google's recommendations. For example, according to PageSpeed I need to "Serve images in next-gen formats" and I just don't have the ability to do that now (underlying image processing libraries don't support it) without a serious time commitment. So I'm worried that a lot of smaller sites that don't have the resources to keep up with Google's requirements are going to get a "badge of shame"..
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Well, if your website is exceptionally slow because you chose a substandard way of building it, why should Google lie to users to... preserve your vanity? It doesn't take much in the way of "resources" to make a webpage that is "fast" by Google's definition.
  - dpau 7y ago
    It's not just about vanity. Warning users that a site "usually loads slow" is a statement of quality. The website might be the best resource on the internet for the type of service or knowledge being provided, but getting that badge immediately sets a bad impression. The person running the site might not have the ability or resources to fix the problem. As an example, Wordpress sites running a slow theme or plugin. There are a lot of small businesses, publications, and hobby sites that simply won't be able to fix these issues.
- orf 7y ago
  > I just don't have time to figure out https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/ Also Chrome doesn't collect or aggregate performance data for sites without a decent amount of traffic. They are not going to label your hobby sites as slow as there is not enough data to do so. https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#faq https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#f...
millstone 7y ago
How does Google know which sites “typically load slow for users?” Is this collected via Chrome telemetry or is there another mechanism?
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experience-report https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experien...
rhacker 7y ago
Isn't this just going to reward the facebooks, amazons, etsys, pinterests and all the other websites that stole the users attentions away from homegrown sites... even more?
buboard 7y ago
what i m seeing with these "safety badges", "lightning icons", "green thumbs up" are attempts by google and apple to control the web the same way they control their app gardens. i m hopeful that they can't though.
kiwicopple 7y ago
It’s crazy how misaligned the incentives are for chrome development. If performance was the criteria by which they made decisions then they would probably bake ad-blocking directly into chrome, since ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance. Instead we are left with PR pieces and false features. It feels like they are creating a lot of noise to drown out the signal.
- mirimir 7y ago
  > ... ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance. That's especially obvious when using nested VPN chains and Tor. Because latency can exceed 500 msec. Sites like HN typically load in a second or two. But sites with ads and tracking take 10 seconds or more.
crazygringo 7y ago
I appreciate the intent, but why are they putting badges/indicators like this into Chrome instead of Search? Sites usually load slowly because because of ads and trackers, and Chrome's only telling me what I'm already seeing with my own eyes. Plus, I already decided to visit the site, and it's probably quicker to finish letting it load than find an alternative source, if one exists at all. Whereas Search would seem much more useful, since it's where I'm already presented with alternative links, and can actually affect which one I click. I know Search already says they de-rank slower sites... but obviously they're still appearing, especially for the "long tail" of searches. So badges still seem like win there. (But the whole concept is sound, I think, because developers often want to build fast sites but management won't dedicate the resources. But if management sees Google is giving them a big red mark, that's suddenly something very easy for them to understand and allow to be fixed.)
- notatoad 7y ago
  from the article: "We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google." We're hearing about this first from Chrome, but that doesn't mean it will happen in chrome first. I suspect that badges of shame will come to the search result pages long before they actually show up in chrome. Say what you will about google's policies, but the chrome team is really pretty good about announcing this sort of thing well in advance. Look at their multi-year rollout schedule for the "not secure" badging in the URL bar. Search results, on the other hand, will just update one day with no warning.
  - jfoster 7y ago
    Right, I think they're using Chrome as a testing ground for this.
Uninen 7y ago
I’d appreciate if DuckDuckGo would implement this kind of speed badge to their search results. Never going to assume Google would even consider it as they sell the things that make sites slow in the first place.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Rather than play offence, play defence. Come up with a "privacy" or "non-tracking" badge. Identify free-standing / independent / non-AMP sites. Note simple and JS-free designs, or graceful degredation. Well-formed page structures (microformats, HTML5), lack of obfuscated elements (JS, CSS), accessibility. An open and distributed Web index standard. Pretty much all of these are generally useful, and disadvantageous to Google.
jaimex2 7y ago
This is great news for the anti-trust case.
basilisks 7y ago
Blue checkmarks but for websites. A merit badge for playing by the biggest boys’ rules.
social_quotient 7y ago
It’s like we need some sort of indicator or progress visualization. Something that will show the user were the page is in terms of loading and rendering.
fouc 7y ago
We need some proper anti-trust action here. Split chrome from google.
- adamredwoods 7y ago
  We have to prove some sort of monopoly, but looking back at Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer should give some legal framework.
swiley 7y ago
I just had to reboot my work computer today because chrome practically wedged it by pushing everything into swap (or whatever Microsoft calls it.) The web gets a lot faster when you dump JavaScript.
- couchand 7y ago
  Or just dump Chrome...
ouid 7y ago
You know, I've noticed that most things load just about instantly with ad blockers.
RenRav 7y ago
If it's just a simple display to the user saying "this website generally loads slow, dont worry", I'm ok with that, I often wonder whether some sites are just bloated or it's my internet connection.
vijaybritto 7y ago
Google does this while at the same time making a heavy framework like this https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13 https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13 . This is not fair. This is abuse of power.
geekybiz 7y ago
I'm a Web Performance guy so moves such as these benefit my business. Despite that - I dislike this heavy handedness by Google. - What speed metrics? - How would they be gathered? If Web Performance was so single dimensional to classify it in this way, it would have been solved a lot better by now.
andai 7y ago
Disable JavaScript in your browser. There, the web is much faster :)
jayd16 7y ago
Whats the point of colorizing the load bar? If I see the bar, don't I already know its slow?
throwGuardian 7y ago
The multitude of comments here scream the same thing: 1. No one trusts Google to be an impartial judge of speed. 2. Increasingly, Google is inserting itself as a non-neutral third party between the end user and creator/developer. Power lies asymmetrically with Google, and threatens both creators & users. If anyone from Google is reading, this incremental but definite appearance of a power grab by Google will only draw more regulation
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  I mostly agree, but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would suit them. It's win-win. We should really just stop using Google so much. You go first, I can't be bothered to switch!
  - zupa-hu 7y ago
    > You go first, I can't be bothered to switch! I had to upvote this. :D
  - vim-guru 7y ago
    Switched about a year ago to duckduckgo. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but the search results are pretty darn good. Give it a go :)
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    I quit, divested, closed my accounts and never looked back (except for YouTube but I block the ads).
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    >but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would suit them That's a recently very popular idea, but in this general form it is simply untrue. It depends on the specifics of any regulation. We can regulate oligopolists in a way that doesn't affect anyone else.
- Arnt 7y ago
  I'm not from Google... but I think you omit one threatened party, and it's the most seriously affected: Facebook. Google wants there to be lots of web sites, lots of web pages. So using someone's web site should be more convenient than using that someone's facebook page. How to achieve that? My guess is that Google has done some research into that, and a focus group or whatever named slowness (or an expectation of slowness) as a disadvantage of the web compared to facebook.
neiman 7y ago
I'm trying to fully understand it. So if I'm in a site that is loading slow, Chrome will tell me "this site is loading slow". which is almost like putting a sign in the middle of the ocean, "you in the ocean". Like, a person should notice it on its own, right? Ok, I understand they mean to tell me that it's slow loading due to the fault of the site, and not due to (let's say) my bad internet or device. But I think that most people don't understand those kind of technicalities, and don't really care to know them. I see it, as someone else put here, a "badge of shame". Moreover, it's kind of regulating the internet. No one gave Google the mandate to regulate the internet. There are two other problems with this "speed above everything else" approach. First, what is fast depends on how the browser parses websites, so one website can be faster in Firefox but slower in Chrome, and still get a "badge of shame". There's no standard here afaik (perhaps I'm wrong). Second, the internet is supposed to be a place of equality, where kids, experimental artists and businesses all get the same respect and treatment. But businesses websites are obviously going to be faster, they got the professional technical stuff to ensure that, making the other second-rate internet citizens.
- tudorw 7y ago
  I'd be okay with it if it flags up what proportion of the page is content and how much is unused, advertising and tracking code...
- sebsito 7y ago
  I think it's big companies' websites which are bloated and slow compared to "kids and experimental artists". > Second, the internet is supposed to be a place of equality, where kids, experimental artists and businesses all get the same respect and treatment I think it's okay not to respect poorly written websites as long as it's the people who can judege. But when big corpos are putting regulations in place on what it means to have a good website – I agree with your point and someday it might impossible to run your own website like it's now with mail server.
- Lukas_Skywalker 7y ago
  I think this might be a try to push AMP. Put the "badge of shame" on slow websites, until ~everyone not on AMP has the badge.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m712 7y ago
So how does this work? Where does Chromium get the data for the websites which load slow? Does this mean that websites which one visits get sent to Google now? Or do they use the existing SafeBrowsing queries to also send page load times? What are the implications of this for tracking?
markosaric 7y ago
Third-party calls are one of the main reasons for slow loading sites. These calls include loading Google Fonts, loading Google Analytics and loading Google's DoubleClick advertising scripts. Remove these calls and scripts, and websites get so much faster. Edit to add some stats: 94% of sites include at least one third-party resource. 76% issue a request to an analytics domain. Median page requests content from 9 unique third-party domains. Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls. https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties
alimbada 7y ago
Ironically, the linked web.dev/fast page took way too long to load for me.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  web.dev also seems pretty broken with Firefox's built-in tracking protection enabled. Ho hum.
dlcmh 7y ago
Just use Safari or Firefox
mfer 7y ago
Now would be a good time for alternative news aggregators.
auiya 7y ago
How will this work in corporate environments with intentionally slow web proxies (decrypting TLS traffic, etc)?
joaobeno 7y ago
This is just another attack on the open & free internet. Why so? Since Google defines per their own metrics fast vs slow, they will imprint that impression upon the user, making an otherwise good willed user a starting bad impression on your site. As people pointed out, this will make AMP even more attractive, driving more traffic away to Google... Also, it may impact sites hosted on cheap far datacenters, like my user being in Brazil, and my server being in Virginia. Suddenly, my site is considered slow by Chrome, while my rich competitor who hosts in São Paulo gets the "fast" badge... I think this kind of classification creates extra confusion and impact at no tangible benefit to everyone that isn't Google.
majortennis 7y ago
I understand why using an anchor tag is not always technically correct, but I don't see how wrapping something like an image in a button is the right thing to do, for an onclick event.

245 points by joeyespo 7y ago

This will give developers leverage to ask for time to optimise, upgrade, and improve things they are not normally allowed to work on, as it will raise the discussion to the level of managers and the general public. However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type configurations faster out of the box? If it is possible to speed up the default config of most websites on the internet, perhaps there is an easy win to be had.

moreira 7y ago
> However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type configurations faster out of the box? I'm pretty sure that most slow websites aren't slow because their server-side rendering takes a long time. This seems to be mostly a front-end oriented thing (especially directed at pages that load MBs of JS); basically if the page doesn't adhere to all the front-end optimisation guidelines.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  The slowness described in the article isn't jank, but time-to-initial-load. Conceivably the initial client-side render could take a nontrivial amount of time, but in the vast majority of cases - just like for server-side rendering - it isn't a deciding factor. The real deciding factor is the amount of dependencies that have to be loaded. This includes JS, but usually the JS for ads/tracking is far larger than the JS for the actual UI, even on fully client-side-rendered sites.
acdha 7y ago
PHP and MySQL are pretty fast out of the box - and have been for a couple decades (a single server was well into hundreds requests per second by 2000). What’s slow are the frameworks on top of them, and a lot of that is going to require big changes since things like the WordPress plugin world or most of the JavaScript world have not had a great culture about monitoring and optimizing things. Simply moving this into the category of problems you can’t ignore would be positive - along with tracking data usage for mobile users on metered plans.

tarjei 7y ago

I hope they roll out good monitoring tools for website owner for these features - i.e not a tool to test your site but a tool to tell you what google reports to it's users about the site. Otherwise you can be fooled by running lighthouse against your local server and never see the "this site loads slowly" message...

ipython 7y ago

This reads to me as an attempt from Google to further balkanize the web. This looks a lot like the "blue bubbles" effect from Apple iMessage. Did Google run out of actual features to implement? How about reacting to real user concerns such as controlling the privacy of their personal data on the web? Rhetorical question, I know...

lkbm 7y ago
Speaking as a real user, let me assure you that website speed definitely falls under real user concerns. I don't know how much I'd use this indicator, but loading speed matters to me. Loading speed matters a lot. This won't win me back from Firefox, but I don't consider it a bad move.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 7y ago
  You know what loads fast? Web pages. What doesn't? User tracking applications that happen to host some content. :(
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    If you are against user tracking, great, you've got many on your side. But what loads fast is web pages that are made to load fast. If they are able to load fast despite user tracking (which is entirely possible), then it is simply a different issue, and this should not be flagging them as slow. If they are flagged, it should be by something different. If Google is going to implement this (which I support in general because so many sites are painfully slow because there aren't enough incentives to make them fast), what they should be measuring is speed of loading, independent of whether it is slow because of user tracking, slow because the developers do other obnoxious stuff (fill it with click bait images, have videos autoplay, etc), use frameworks sloppily, put too much contents on the page, have a high res background image or video, have a crappy server or use a slow backend language, or whatever it is. While Google does a lot of user tracking, I think the normal way they do it is actually pretty fast. Fault them for user tracking, but if they are able to allow site owners show Google ads without slowing down the page load significantly, don't lump them in with all these other ones that both track users, as well as make the site a painful user experience.

monkpit 7y ago

I feel like this will get a lot of flak from HN users, but I think this will overall be a benefit to the user experience on all browsers, not just chrome.

reustle 7y ago

> Your website seems slow, try speeding it up with AMP today!

pcora 7y ago
I used to hate AMP with my guts. But to be honest, usually when I tried to avoid or loaded the site instead of AMP, I get presented with a worse experience in a bloated web-site, whereas when I click on the AMP version, it loads immediately. So now I don't care anymore. But google is not my main search engine, so I less very little of it.
mlinksva 7y ago
To save others a search, this text is not in the original post.
maaaats 7y ago
I'm thinking the same, this willbe used somehow to push more users into Google's walled garden. Amp is like ten times as slow for me.. Firefox on android, a bug in amp makes the pages not scrollable. Have to press the tiny little icon in the top right, then again press the url, and then wait for the page to load an additional time.

graphememes 7y ago

Who watches the watchmen?

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
Mozilla?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I hope they won't whitelist their own pages from this. Maybe then they'll notice Google's own products have a performance problem.

neogodless 7y ago
Gmail Loading... Usually loads slow.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  I think the "Usually loads slow" warning shown in the article is grammatically incorrect. Shouldn't it say "Usually loads slowly"?
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Came to say this. It seems as though a browser of chrome's scale ought to spell-check before cutting a release?
    - nvrspyx 7y ago
      I'm going to be a little nitpicky here: This would be grammar checking, not spell checking. "Slow" is spelled correctly, it's just not the right word (adjective vs adverb). This also seems to still be in the experimentation phase and is not released as far as I can tell and may never actually make it into Chromium based on: > In the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging. This may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users. Regardless, I agree. This probably should've been caught early.
      - wruza 7y ago
        Maybe they used adjectives instead of adverbs because it’s both ad-words and they can no longer feel the difference.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Generally, I can tell when a website is loading slowly because it, well, takes a long time to load. Am I misunderstanding what Google is trying to do? I'm not seeing the use case.

robbrown451 7y ago
It might make more sense to work it into their search engine. However, it might be nice if it makes some sort of objective measure.
mlinksva 7y ago
If the progress bar is green and a site is loading slowly, you're having an anomalous experience, be patient? If blue, expected, maybe give up and don't visit again? That's my impression.
andybak 7y ago
Erm. How do you tell that before you click?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The screenshot in TFA shows a Google slow site warning after a link to the site has been clicked.
  - andybak 7y ago
    Ah. I hadn't actually looked at TFA.
heavyset_go 7y ago
> Am I misunderstanding what Google is trying to do? I'm not seeing the use case. They're trying to normalize Google's approval process on users so that they can leverage this feature for a profit.

reaperducer 7y ago

Google Capone: "Hey, nytimes.com, your site loads awful slow. We're gonna have to put this badge of shame on it for everyone to see. Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through us, I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically disappear..."

sneak 7y ago
I think you misspelled AMP.
flukus 7y ago
> Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through us, I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically disappear... My experience with everything google has touched lately suggest that this wouldn't improve speed any. Gmail and youtube make continental drift look speedy and even the search page takes 1.4MB and takes over a second to load for me (maybe corporate network issue), that's approaching the size of doom to display a dozen links. Google doesn't have any moral authority when it comes to bloat. Edit - for reference HN takes about the same time to load, but that has to cross the pacific ocean whereas google supposedly has local data centers.
- alttag 7y ago
  There's a big difference between "done loading" and "appears to be done loading". Google is reportedly very cautious about the latter, and pulls some hijinks to appear faster than it is. Frankly, I'd be happier if more sites paid a similar level of attention. That said, if your search page takes over a second, you're right, it might be an issue with your network.
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  I think the point being made is that it's no longer actually about the speed, it's about the 'badge of shame'. The analogy being used is accurate, in that 'protection money' isn't, and was never, about protection.
- Avamander 7y ago

reaperducer 7y ago

Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed. We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google. Exactly what does "high-quality experiences" mean? Penalize sites with bad colors? Sites that are artsy and an algorithm can't understand? Sites that have been repositories of information for longer than Google has been around? Sites that don't meet Google's worldview? That disagree with Google's politics?

rlv-dan 7y ago
"Quality" should be reserved for the content and its usefulness. Speed is not a quality factor. It's a convenience.

Lammy 7y ago

This page doesn't contain any body text unless I run their Javascript. Is that supposed to be faster?

sakisv 7y ago

While I appreciate fast loading sites as much as anyone, there's something I appreciate even more: getting to the content as fast as possible. It's becoming increasingly common to have all sorts of pop-ups blocking a big part of the screen at best or adding an overlay across the entire body. If only I knew that my click would result in that kind of monstrosity I wouldn't have clicked in the first place. So maybe it would be more useful to show an of how many things we need to close before we get to the content. I think that something like this would also help get us to "a faster web".

robbrown451 7y ago
They say "Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed. We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google" That seems to cover such things.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I'm worried that their definition of "high-quality experiences" will be the same one as typically used in UX on the web - i.e. how much money did the users ultimately made the site, and not whether they actually had a good time.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    I understand a lot of the distrust of Google her one HN, but I also don't think that would be their style. To me, the sites done with Google ads aren't the ones that are the problem, then tend to load fast and not put a bunch of crap in your face. Yeah they track you and such, not denying that or supporting that, but Google generally pushes back against the sort of bad experience you find at so many sites.
musicale 7y ago
So many sites load 8MB of garbage, often from dozens of domains, just to display 8KB of text. Then as soon as you try to start reading, an obnoxious pop-up window appears, demanding that you sign up for their spam list. These are anti-patterns that need to go away.

sgt101 7y ago

Pages are made of 30 sites, more. This is what makes the experience shit, and Google are bang up responsible. The architecture of the web did not, and does not, include this - the business model that is sustained by it exploits the web, it does not support it.

davidgerard 7y ago

Ad blockers speed up the web quite a bit! Pity about that for Chrome, hey.

X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago

There's a concern over pushing AMP & their ads. I totally get that, but so far the recommendations that they link to aren't directly related to either: % curl https://web.dev/fast/ 2> /dev/null | grep -I amp Terms & Privacy </a>, and code samples are licensed under the

jjcm 7y ago

To me this is better than amp - give me clear messaging around a site's performance rather than mandating a platform that gives the site less control. I certainly worry that there's the potential to abuse this, and I also wonder if Google's own sites (i.e. amp pages) will be biased. To their credit they're showing one of Google's own pages as being slow in the example, but I'd be interested in seeing a 3rd party analysis of what pages are considered slow and which aren't. Another part of me worries that this will lead to a cobra effect[1], where people optimize a page's first load so Chrome says the page is fast, while withholding the main content of the page for a delayed load, leading to even more site bloat. Identifying when a page has actually loaded will be tricky. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

kaycebasques 7y ago
See my other comment about how our metrics are designed to capture various milestones in the loading experience. I think it’s already harder to game a good Performance score than you might imagine, and it’s only going to get harder over time as the web platform collectively gets better at metrics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477

butz 7y ago

I prefer Firefox's way of "moving towards a faster web" - blocking trackers.

kome 7y ago
Indeed, it's so much more effective and it has immediate real results. Also: it's not a "police state" approach. Google loves a good police state.

ycombonator 7y ago

“ Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed.“ My speculation is that they are gearing towards web moderation. Tag sites that don’t agree with their world view as “potentially harmful”. This could make an average chrome user immediately balk at opening the site and reading the content. Before you downvote my comment explain why the above scenario is not plausible.

Conlectus 7y ago
Google search has defined itself by being the way people access the web, and already has heavy antitrust pressure put on it but the EU for related reasons. Extending that would go against their stated world view, and more importantly raise even more regulatory concerns. This situation differs from eg. YouTube because they do not themselves host the content, and are not subject to copyright laws related to it. Also: Google is made of human beings who have already protested against, for example, censoring Google within China.

Endy 7y ago

The best way to have a faster web is to get rid of Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AMP, "web assembly", WebDRM, ECMAScript (and all derivatives), and go back to only loading text and images from a blind server to a user-agent entirely defined by the wishes of the specific user. But all the stuff that makes the Web slow and pointless to use is how Alphabet makes money. So as long as you drink the Google-Aid, you're doomed to a slow web of garbage.

shantly 7y ago
Bingo. We patted ourselves on the back for killing the worst annoyances of the web (pop-ups, terrible Flash menus that were always some different, cute thing for every site, big, slow, Applets—god, those would feel responsive and light compared to even a "lean" modern "Web App") but kept a scripting language with enough power to re-create all of that, and worse. The fix is getting rid of it. We won't. Web UX is gonna generally be trash until we get rid of or reign in (esp. remove ability to make requests without user interaction, and remove ability to listen for most events) Javascript. Which, again, won't happen. So Web UX—in practice, as seen in the wild, not what a developer may make to demo light web development or what certain niche sites may do—is doomed to be terrible.
roca 7y ago
A fine way to make sure that users need Windows, iOS or Android to run most applications, and that desktop Linux is completely useless.
jamesgeck0 7y ago
Webmail was terrible back when every single click required a fetching a new page load. Even on a reasonably fast DSL connection, JavaScript Gmail is noticeably more snappy than HTML Gmail. Pre-ajax online maps? Almost unusable. I certainly wouldn't want to return to those days.
- Endy 7y ago
  Yes, because you're asking a client for text and images downloaded from a server to do things it was never intended to. When you start employing torturous misuse, you're going to find the tool unsuited to the job. You can use a pipe wrench as a makeshift hammer, but a sledgehammer can't tighten a nut (more than once). Use an email and newsreader for email. Use a full mapping suite to download specialized map data. Don't force a web browser to shim into those niche jobs. Old adage I learned with computers: Do One Thing, Well. That's what each program should be. One thing.

forgotmypw3 7y ago

The web is already pretty fast if you don't put too much stuff into your webpages.

tpmx 7y ago
️:) Yeah, pretty much. If web sites would stop stuffing these giant js frameworks pages + 3 trackers + 3 ad networks into all page we could be using like iPhone 4 now.

danShumway 7y ago

One of the regular complaints I've pushed against AMP is that it's a hamfisted way to address page speed. Search placement should be determined by generic speed tests, not by forcing developers to use Google's technology. This looks to me like a positive effort. I'm not thrilled with overlays like this, and I'm not thrilled with baking this kind of stuff into the browser. It feels over-engineered and weird. But, I think it's a better direction than AMP. There are a lot of ways this could go bad, but very cautious thumbs up from me.

saagarjha 7y ago

This kind of effort sounds great, but the issue is that Google has already spent their goodwill on improving the web in this area. Who can trust the company to implement this fairly? Will Gmail get a “badge of shame” (it surely deserves one)? Will websites that are fast but don’t use AMP or the new Google hotness be ranked as they should? There are a lot of questions that I’m sure many have already answered in their head based on Google’s past efforts.

vkizl 7y ago

Reddit is going to earn this so fast lol

ThrowAway54769 7y ago

FE devs don’t care about end users. Their sites are slow to load(TheVerge.com), are absolute trash to use (TechCrunch.com) and display an utter lack of concern of compute resources(Lifehacker.com - let you phone idle on this page a few minutes and feel how hot it gets). FE devs want to be taken seriously, but they refuse to learn the lessons the rest of us have already learned. If FE devs would get their crap together we wouldn’t see posts about Google trying to wrest as much control as possible away from them.

lllr_finger 7y ago
I have only my anecdotal experience, but when I did full stack work at two large employers HN readers would definitely recognize, we had some really talented developers, and nearly every poorly performing part of a page was dictated by a product owner. The business can't easily and explicitly monetize "fast" to the same degree it can bloated features and ads/tracking.
- ThrowAway54769 7y ago
  Sorry, but there’s no way anyone can completely blame the POs on this mess.
vkizl 7y ago
Amen brother. The day frontend developers stop acting like toddlers, then they will be treated like adults.
dredmorbius 7y ago
"FE" == "front end", as in front-end Web development, for the confused.

syphilis2 7y ago

Maybe Mozilla can add something like this to Firefox, but for websites that break when using adblockers.

esotericn 7y ago

I'm on a slow connection. This page took a good while to load. 100kB of JS, 100kB of fonts. The images get a pass. There's jQuery in there. It's a blog post. wat? Just send me the text.

fenwick67 7y ago

Can someone explain the point of this for the user? As a user, I already know if the page is loading slowly.

SquareWheel 7y ago
You might not know why. Is it just a slow site, or is your connection failing you?

dpau 7y ago

> We... hope to land on something that is practically achievable by all developers. There are a LOT of people who have websites that depend upon software that they don't directly control, best example might be Wordpress users with plugins. I myself have built a number of hobby websites that I just don't have time to figure out how to update based on Google's recommendations. For example, according to PageSpeed I need to "Serve images in next-gen formats" and I just don't have the ability to do that now (underlying image processing libraries don't support it) without a serious time commitment. So I'm worried that a lot of smaller sites that don't have the resources to keep up with Google's requirements are going to get a "badge of shame"..

microcolonel 7y ago
Well, if your website is exceptionally slow because you chose a substandard way of building it, why should Google lie to users to... preserve your vanity? It doesn't take much in the way of "resources" to make a webpage that is "fast" by Google's definition.
- dpau 7y ago
  It's not just about vanity. Warning users that a site "usually loads slow" is a statement of quality. The website might be the best resource on the internet for the type of service or knowledge being provided, but getting that badge immediately sets a bad impression. The person running the site might not have the ability or resources to fix the problem. As an example, Wordpress sites running a slow theme or plugin. There are a lot of small businesses, publications, and hobby sites that simply won't be able to fix these issues.
orf 7y ago
> I just don't have time to figure out https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/ Also Chrome doesn't collect or aggregate performance data for sites without a decent amount of traffic. They are not going to label your hobby sites as slow as there is not enough data to do so. https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#faq https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#f...

millstone 7y ago

How does Google know which sites “typically load slow for users?” Is this collected via Chrome telemetry or is there another mechanism?

kaycebasques 7y ago
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experience-report https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experien...

rhacker 7y ago

Isn't this just going to reward the facebooks, amazons, etsys, pinterests and all the other websites that stole the users attentions away from homegrown sites... even more?

buboard 7y ago

what i m seeing with these "safety badges", "lightning icons", "green thumbs up" are attempts by google and apple to control the web the same way they control their app gardens. i m hopeful that they can't though.

kiwicopple 7y ago

It’s crazy how misaligned the incentives are for chrome development. If performance was the criteria by which they made decisions then they would probably bake ad-blocking directly into chrome, since ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance. Instead we are left with PR pieces and false features. It feels like they are creating a lot of noise to drown out the signal.

mirimir 7y ago
> ... ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance. That's especially obvious when using nested VPN chains and Tor. Because latency can exceed 500 msec. Sites like HN typically load in a second or two. But sites with ads and tracking take 10 seconds or more.

crazygringo 7y ago

I appreciate the intent, but why are they putting badges/indicators like this into Chrome instead of Search? Sites usually load slowly because because of ads and trackers, and Chrome's only telling me what I'm already seeing with my own eyes. Plus, I already decided to visit the site, and it's probably quicker to finish letting it load than find an alternative source, if one exists at all. Whereas Search would seem much more useful, since it's where I'm already presented with alternative links, and can actually affect which one I click. I know Search already says they de-rank slower sites... but obviously they're still appearing, especially for the "long tail" of searches. So badges still seem like win there. (But the whole concept is sound, I think, because developers often want to build fast sites but management won't dedicate the resources. But if management sees Google is giving them a big red mark, that's suddenly something very easy for them to understand and allow to be fixed.)

notatoad 7y ago
from the article: "We are building out speed badging in close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google." We're hearing about this first from Chrome, but that doesn't mean it will happen in chrome first. I suspect that badges of shame will come to the search result pages long before they actually show up in chrome. Say what you will about google's policies, but the chrome team is really pretty good about announcing this sort of thing well in advance. Look at their multi-year rollout schedule for the "not secure" badging in the URL bar. Search results, on the other hand, will just update one day with no warning.
- jfoster 7y ago
  Right, I think they're using Chrome as a testing ground for this.

Uninen 7y ago

I’d appreciate if DuckDuckGo would implement this kind of speed badge to their search results. Never going to assume Google would even consider it as they sell the things that make sites slow in the first place.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Rather than play offence, play defence. Come up with a "privacy" or "non-tracking" badge. Identify free-standing / independent / non-AMP sites. Note simple and JS-free designs, or graceful degredation. Well-formed page structures (microformats, HTML5), lack of obfuscated elements (JS, CSS), accessibility. An open and distributed Web index standard. Pretty much all of these are generally useful, and disadvantageous to Google.

jaimex2 7y ago

This is great news for the anti-trust case.

basilisks 7y ago

Blue checkmarks but for websites. A merit badge for playing by the biggest boys’ rules.

social_quotient 7y ago

It’s like we need some sort of indicator or progress visualization. Something that will show the user were the page is in terms of loading and rendering.

fouc 7y ago

We need some proper anti-trust action here. Split chrome from google.

adamredwoods 7y ago
We have to prove some sort of monopoly, but looking back at Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer should give some legal framework.

swiley 7y ago

I just had to reboot my work computer today because chrome practically wedged it by pushing everything into swap (or whatever Microsoft calls it.) The web gets a lot faster when you dump JavaScript.

couchand 7y ago
Or just dump Chrome...

ouid 7y ago

You know, I've noticed that most things load just about instantly with ad blockers.

RenRav 7y ago

If it's just a simple display to the user saying "this website generally loads slow, dont worry", I'm ok with that, I often wonder whether some sites are just bloated or it's my internet connection.

vijaybritto 7y ago

Google does this while at the same time making a heavy framework like this https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13 https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13 . This is not fair. This is abuse of power.

geekybiz 7y ago

I'm a Web Performance guy so moves such as these benefit my business. Despite that - I dislike this heavy handedness by Google. - What speed metrics? - How would they be gathered? If Web Performance was so single dimensional to classify it in this way, it would have been solved a lot better by now.

andai 7y ago

Disable JavaScript in your browser. There, the web is much faster :)

jayd16 7y ago

Whats the point of colorizing the load bar? If I see the bar, don't I already know its slow?

throwGuardian 7y ago

The multitude of comments here scream the same thing: 1. No one trusts Google to be an impartial judge of speed. 2. Increasingly, Google is inserting itself as a non-neutral third party between the end user and creator/developer. Power lies asymmetrically with Google, and threatens both creators & users. If anyone from Google is reading, this incremental but definite appearance of a power grab by Google will only draw more regulation

cs02rm0 7y ago
I mostly agree, but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would suit them. It's win-win. We should really just stop using Google so much. You go first, I can't be bothered to switch!
- zupa-hu 7y ago
  > You go first, I can't be bothered to switch! I had to upvote this. :D
- vim-guru 7y ago
  Switched about a year ago to duckduckgo. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but the search results are pretty darn good. Give it a go :)
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  I quit, divested, closed my accounts and never looked back (except for YouTube but I block the ads).
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  >but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would suit them That's a recently very popular idea, but in this general form it is simply untrue. It depends on the specifics of any regulation. We can regulate oligopolists in a way that doesn't affect anyone else.
Arnt 7y ago
I'm not from Google... but I think you omit one threatened party, and it's the most seriously affected: Facebook. Google wants there to be lots of web sites, lots of web pages. So using someone's web site should be more convenient than using that someone's facebook page. How to achieve that? My guess is that Google has done some research into that, and a focus group or whatever named slowness (or an expectation of slowness) as a disadvantage of the web compared to facebook.

neiman 7y ago

I'm trying to fully understand it. So if I'm in a site that is loading slow, Chrome will tell me "this site is loading slow". which is almost like putting a sign in the middle of the ocean, "you in the ocean". Like, a person should notice it on its own, right? Ok, I understand they mean to tell me that it's slow loading due to the fault of the site, and not due to (let's say) my bad internet or device. But I think that most people don't understand those kind of technicalities, and don't really care to know them. I see it, as someone else put here, a "badge of shame". Moreover, it's kind of regulating the internet. No one gave Google the mandate to regulate the internet. There are two other problems with this "speed above everything else" approach. First, what is fast depends on how the browser parses websites, so one website can be faster in Firefox but slower in Chrome, and still get a "badge of shame". There's no standard here afaik (perhaps I'm wrong). Second, the internet is supposed to be a place of equality, where kids, experimental artists and businesses all get the same respect and treatment. But businesses websites are obviously going to be faster, they got the professional technical stuff to ensure that, making the other second-rate internet citizens.

tudorw 7y ago
I'd be okay with it if it flags up what proportion of the page is content and how much is unused, advertising and tracking code...
sebsito 7y ago
I think it's big companies' websites which are bloated and slow compared to "kids and experimental artists". > Second, the internet is supposed to be a place of equality, where kids, experimental artists and businesses all get the same respect and treatment I think it's okay not to respect poorly written websites as long as it's the people who can judege. But when big corpos are putting regulations in place on what it means to have a good website – I agree with your point and someday it might impossible to run your own website like it's now with mail server.
Lukas_Skywalker 7y ago
I think this might be a try to push AMP. Put the "badge of shame" on slow websites, until ~everyone not on AMP has the badge.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

m712 7y ago

So how does this work? Where does Chromium get the data for the websites which load slow? Does this mean that websites which one visits get sent to Google now? Or do they use the existing SafeBrowsing queries to also send page load times? What are the implications of this for tracking?

markosaric 7y ago

Third-party calls are one of the main reasons for slow loading sites. These calls include loading Google Fonts, loading Google Analytics and loading Google's DoubleClick advertising scripts. Remove these calls and scripts, and websites get so much faster. Edit to add some stats: 94% of sites include at least one third-party resource. 76% issue a request to an analytics domain. Median page requests content from 9 unique third-party domains. Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls. https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties

alimbada 7y ago

Ironically, the linked web.dev/fast page took way too long to load for me.

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
web.dev also seems pretty broken with Firefox's built-in tracking protection enabled. Ho hum.

dlcmh 7y ago

Just use Safari or Firefox

mfer 7y ago

Now would be a good time for alternative news aggregators.

auiya 7y ago

How will this work in corporate environments with intentionally slow web proxies (decrypting TLS traffic, etc)?

joaobeno 7y ago

This is just another attack on the open & free internet. Why so? Since Google defines per their own metrics fast vs slow, they will imprint that impression upon the user, making an otherwise good willed user a starting bad impression on your site. As people pointed out, this will make AMP even more attractive, driving more traffic away to Google... Also, it may impact sites hosted on cheap far datacenters, like my user being in Brazil, and my server being in Virginia. Suddenly, my site is considered slow by Chrome, while my rich competitor who hosts in São Paulo gets the "fast" badge... I think this kind of classification creates extra confusion and impact at no tangible benefit to everyone that isn't Google.

majortennis 7y ago

I understand why using an anchor tag is not always technically correct, but I don't see how wrapping something like an image in a button is the right thing to do, for an onclick event.