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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 ou

• 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.
      • taeric 7y ago
        I don't want to be stonewalling progress. But evidence is that any savings win here will be wasted by the same parties that are bringing the savings. Google lost a ton of good will by making Gmail a laughably bad experience on load.
        • mattkevan 7y ago
          When I had to use gmail for work I switched back to the plain html interface. It was startlingly fast As far as I could see all the complicated front-end stuff added zero to the user experience. Ok, so yeah, you needed a page load to view a message or whatever, but it was quick and hardly noticeable. All they needed to do was freshen up the stylesheet and call it a day. But, I guess, all those developers and product managers needed something to do in between building a new messaging app and killing the previous one.
          • graphememes 7y ago
            Just switched over to the HTML view, and wow. I'm never going back.
  • themoonbus 7y ago
    Walled gardens and proprietary software can allow for fantastic user experiences in a way that open platforms often cannot match. However, I feel focusing on the user experience misses the main point - the web is an open platform, and this is an example of Google exerting an authority that many may not feel comfortable with.
    • lkbm 7y ago
      In what way is "indicate that this website is slow" a walled garden or contrary to openness?
      • skywhopper 7y ago
        Because the criteria will inevitably be biased towards technology and techniques that favor Google, Chrome, AMP, etc. If you trust Google to be an unbiased arbiter of objective measurements of website efficiency, you are giving them a lot more credit than I would at this point.
        • jefftk 7y ago
          Visit an AMP page in Lighthouse and you won't see an especially good score. Lighthouse doesn't special-case AMP or pick metrics that would make AMP look good.
          • adrianN 7y ago
            Just because a monopoly is not acting maliciously today, that doesn't mean that it won't tomorrow.
      • themoonbus 7y ago
        Because Google is the decider of what constitutes "slow"? You have a single organization deciding what the threshold is between slow and fast. And, they also have a Google-approved solution (amp) that I'm sure they will tie into the recommended actions for "slow" pages. I'm not saying it's a walled garden (that's a more extreme situation on the continuum between open and closed), I was just using the phrase to illustrate my point that the end-user experience isn't the only factor to consider.
  • segmondy 7y ago
    Then demand for smaller sites, nothing will make for a faster web if web pages are larger than operating systems from just a few years ago. do you know how ridiculous it is to have web pages that are tens and hundreds of megs? The issue is not with the browsers, it's with the damn stupid sites out there. 3G is pretty much useless out there, let alone 2G.
    • zeroxfe 7y ago
      How do you demand for smaller sites? To whom do you plead? Why will they listen to you?
      • youareostriches 7y ago
        You demonstrate your intent by paying for content subscriptions rather than visiting sites entirely supported by online advertisements.
        • alexis_fr 7y ago
          There is no paid site that matches the quality of HN. Same goes for most social network: What gives them value is contributions, and contributions only seem to happen if the access is free. Otherwise you don’t reach a high-enough density of people.
          • youareostriches 7y ago
            It should’ve been obvious I was talking about news sites. Even if I wasn’t, you assumed I was talking about social media without any supporting basis.
    • holtalanm 7y ago
      I have never seen a site that loaded hundreds of megs of data. That seems a little exaggeratory.
      • 7y ago
  • reaperducer 7y ago
    Do you really need your browser to tell you a site is loading slowly? You're staring at the screen; don't you know if it's slow just by existing and moving forward through time? Or is this just a way for Google to kill off the progress bar, too?
    • jefftk 7y ago
      If I'm staring at the screen waiting for a page to load, a loading indicator can help me figure out if I should keep waiting longer or give up. That's very useful! If this gets site owners to work more on loading speed so they can get a badge that's great. I used to work on mod_pagespeed and one of the big problems was that publishers just didn't care that much about loading speed. (Disclosure: I work for Google)
      • jfoster 7y ago
        Based on what this feature is and the scenario you described, I think it may disincent site owners from speeding up slow sites. At the moment, a user doesn't know if a site will ever load. If Chrome reassures that "this site usually loads slowly" they may stick around since they are then reassured that it probably will eventually load, it's just taking a while.
        • jefftk 7y ago
          Maybe users will respond that way, but that's still a good outcome. Giving users a better idea about what to expect so they can make more informed decisions? Great!
          • close04 7y ago
            > Giving users a better idea about what to expect Can I expect Google to do the same about data that may be sent by Chrome to Google without users realizing, just so users can make informed decisions?
            • 7y ago
  • shantly 7y ago
    Memory size is a problem, too. Even a small amount of Javascript can allocate a ton of memory. I'd love to see a more memory-efficient language replace JS, then a reasonable but lowish memory limit put in place. Say, 8MB, which still seems generous to me. The only trouble is you'd have to find some way to keep developers from using the DOM as extra memory. But the capabilities of Web scripting languages, outside perhaps some very strict and explicitly enabled on a case-by-case basis sandbox, really ought to be limited more anyway.
    • icebraining 7y ago
      JS is not necessarily heavy. For example, the Espruino is a platform running JS on microcontrollers with less than 100KB of RAM: https://www.espruino.com/ https://www.espruino.com/
  • buboard 7y ago
    If their speed assessment works as "great" as their "mobile usability" tool works, i doubt their indicator will be actually meaningful. YEah speed matters a lot , but it's self-correcting. If a website cannot load after a minute on a spotty cellular connection , i ll just close the browser and they lose the impresison
  • Angostura 7y ago
    I agree speed is a concern. It takes me at least second to tap the tittle AMP banner and then tap on the real website address.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  It reads to me as an attempt from Google to further shame people into following better practices, like when they started factoring HTTPS into search rankings. I think the principle is a fine one (though it is a bit odd considering the web's main source of slowness is ads/tracking tech, and... that's Google's main business). But in practice I'd bet that - like most of Google's broad-strokes efforts - there will be many edge cases/outliers where people get penalized unjustly, and there won't be an appeals process.
  • codyogden 7y ago
    > further shame people into following better practices "Better" as prescribed by who? At this point, I'm under the impression that if you're not implementing AMP for content, Google is going to rank you lower and now publicly shame you to users. They _say_ this is not the case, but it's impossible to ignore now that they're introducing naming and shaming. It just seems like features way outside the scope of what a web browser should be providing to users. Editing to add my other thought: I've built websites that routinely score horribly on Google's proprietary PageSpeed Insights despite fixing everything within my power (usually Google's own analytics scripts score badly), but also score very high on every other reasonable industry test of similar nature. It's hard to convince me that they alone should be an arbiter for this type of feedback given to users.
    • jefftk 7y ago
      > Google's proprietary PageSpeed Insights The previous version of PageSpeed Insights was open source (https://github.com/pagespeed/page-speed https://github.com/pagespeed/page-speed) and the current version is a wrapper around Lighthouse which is also open source (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse). (Disclosure: I work for Google)
      • codyogden 7y ago
        I believe you, obviously. I have historically received drastically different results between, for example, web.dev / Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights with the latter outputting a very low arbitrary 'rating' or 'score' and the former providing results I would expect. Like a lot of efforts at Google, things seem duplicated. As an outsider, it is a frustrating experience catering to Google's performance ideals because the tools and 'best practice' positions do not seem to be unified in one place.
• vast 7y ago
  This is Googles blueprint to eradicate apple. They want Web apps to dominate because they already have a standing there and apple has a large marketshare in native apps.
• BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  "Did Google run out of actual features to implement?" That question is kind of coming in at the wrong angle. Google has identified the speed at which web sites load as a problem, and have determined that is a problem worth their while to try and solve. The problem is that it's all the tracking and advertising that's the cause of the slow loading and Google, being as that tracking and advertising pays their bills, can't solve that as the fundamental problem, so they're doing a very odd looking Twister-Limbo set of actions in trying to reframe what the problem is: speed of page loading. Google are attempting to treat the symptoms, because they profit from the cause. Google needs to solve the speed symptom before someone else solves the ad and tracking cause (ad blockers, PiHole, etc.) in a more fundamentally non-technical-user accessible way.
  • judge2020 7y ago
    At least based on the picture, the 'slow' badge should only show during the TTFB, ie. before any paint occurs. Since Google Ads loads after the paint websites likely won't have issues of mis-labeling.
  • ouid 7y ago
    The vast majority of people that I know who don't use adblock do so because they are A) afraid that it will slow down their web browsing, or B) believe that it magically generates money for content creators.
  • Arnt 7y ago
    I disagree strongly with your analysis. Advertising is a contributor, but it's far from being the cause. AFAICT there are five causes, namely slow DNS lookups due to inappropriately low TTLs, a lack of caching both serverside and clientside, page bloat, an overdose of javascript and an overdose of tracking/advertising (which contributes to bloat and javascript). Making a Rails site pleasantly fast was more work than it should've been. Rails didn't make it easy to cache page components, didn't make it easy to cache the entire page either, made it easy to inadvertently wait on the database. And here's the key, this doesn't seem to be regarded as a big problem. The rails developers and users don't regard slow speed as a big problem. Is that unusual? Do Django, Magnolia, Magento have a different culture? I haven't noticed (but I might not). Assuming not, the root cause is an inattention to making sites pleasantly fast, and that inattention has simply allowed advertising to have the same problem as the rest of the site's software.
• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I will agree with you that Google has killed the web, news groups, federated chat, and so many other things, but I find the term "balkanization" both very disrespectful and at the same time a bad fit for describing Google subverting nearly all communication channels.