16 ms·

Google can't pass its own page speed test

374 points by EvgeniyZh 5y ago

SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
For once, I think this is a good initiative from google. Most websites are over-bloated and this is a good incentive to move the web in the right direction.
- amelius 5y ago
  Would you also think of it as a good initiative if the US government demanded the change? I don't know. To me it sounds a bit like "you can only be in the AppStore if your app meets these requirements". If Google was pure in its reasoning, they would allow slow pages to still be listed high in search results for people who don't care about page load times.
  - johnnypangs 5y ago
    It seems like this is the case. There is a link to a more informative article in the Reddit post that has a spokesperson from google who says that if you’re the most relevant, you’re going to still be ranked well. Article link: https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/
    - amelius 5y ago
      Ok, let's extend this. If two pages are equally relevant and equally fast, will they show me the page with the fewest advertisements first? And why is speed more important than number of advertisements?
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        Fortunately, speed is almost always inversely proportional to number of ads! So the two mostly go hand in hand, for sites with similar content.
  - 0-_-0 5y ago
    I think the best approach would be to show a small indicator of page load times in the search results so everyone can decide for themelves what they prefer. Then these preferences would influence what is shown on top, creating an optimisation feedback cycle.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    > for people who don't care about page load times. And I am sure there is an incredibly high percentage of people who love nothing more than slow web sites.
    - amelius 5y ago
      If they are ad-free and tracking-free, then you can give me slow web sites.
      - alserio 5y ago
        For some strange reason ad-free and tracking-free sites are usually faster...
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - EqScr9a3 5y ago
    There is an enormous difference between a demand from a government that would be backed up by the threat of violence and anything Google is doing. You are free to ignore Google without any risk of being shot or imprisoned.
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      Yep, the only possibility is that your business might be destroyed, you might be bankrupt, and your family needs to start again from zero.
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
>Cumulative layout shift is supposed to measure whether your site shifts around while it's loading, but it's so strict that even Google Translate fails the test. And so it should be. There's hardly anything worse than having things shift around after you start reading, scrolling or clicking on something. I think it's a very good sign if Google's own sites fail these tests. It means the tests are meaningful.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  On the other hand, it means that Google has stopped caring about UI performance. Of course, anyone who’s used Google Groups lately could tell you that.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Priority is the ads display performance; search or news are just an addition to the actual business.
  - sim_card_map 5y ago
    or Gmail for the last 10 years
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    I'm not sure its reasonable to jump from "Google Translate has a jump' to "Google has stopped caring about UI performance"
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      As I say, compare Google Groups today to Google Groups 10 years ago. Or gmail. Or Calendar. Though Groups is possibly the best example, as it went, more or less overnight, from one of Google's snappiest properties to about its most sluggish. Google used to be very concerned about UI performance, but they seem to have totally lost interest in it.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    My theory is that they test this on their 10 Gbit company network, and high-end laptops, and it works great. So it's hard to convince anyone that it's a problem.
butz 5y ago
While improving performance is a good goal, chasing after perfect scores in Google tests sometimes leads to increased complexity of code, bugs on older browsers and even bigger website size.
- citrin_ru 5y ago
  Goodhart's law works here too: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One should consider all factors before making a change and don't blindly target the test score only.
Evidlo 5y ago
Is there somewhere I can paste my website URL to test it with Web Vitals?
- topicseed 5y ago
  Sure, go ahead at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- fouronnes3 5y ago
  https://web.dev/measure/ https://web.dev/measure/
  - lucgommans 5y ago
    I wonder where they measure from, as it claims >1 second of loading time for what is ~500ms in my browser. And my browser is also absurdly slow, now that I look at it. The HTML at https://lucgommans.nl https://lucgommans.nl is 978 bytes, the CSS 2KB, and the ping 39ms. With DNS+TCP+TLS+HTTP, the HTML downloads in 159ms. And then it waits. And waits. Then, after 134ms, it decides that DOM content has been loaded and fires the DOMContentLoaded event (there is no JS on the page). And then it waits some more, until after waiting 177ms it decides to start downloading the CSS which finishes in 44ms. And then it waits again for 40ms, downloads the 33KB background image in 80ms, and finally clocks the total loading time at 508ms. How fast should it be? The loading times are 283ms altogether (sequentially), how long does parsing 3KB of data take on a modern CPU? Close to zero right? I remember in iirc ~2007-2015, quite regularly there would be news that browser X had optimized the DOM parser, or rewritten the JavaScript engine, or cut off some time with this or that. What even is going on here, did all this go out the window with the multi-process browser where it has to talk to other processes to get things done, or what's up with all this waiting? Does anyone know?
    - 5y ago
rasz 5y ago
Im actually surprised how good YT comes out in this. The page is a dumpster fire: Before Polymer (current YT framework) YT video page weighted somewhere around 50KB (10KB compressed) and was ordinary HTML + 1MB js player (400KB compressed). As soon as HTML part loaded the page was all there. Now its 600KB (100KB compressed) JSON + additional 8MB desktop_polymer.js (1MB compressed) that needs to be compiled/interpreted before it even starts building the page client side and anything starts showing up. 1MB js player is on top of that.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  "Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself."
- kevingadd 5y ago
  It's astonishing how much worse they made it - and intentionally made it worse in browsers without Web Components, like Firefox. Forcing the old non-Polymer website was like hitting the turbo button on an old PC.
  - easrng 5y ago
    It wasn't Web Components (Firefox supports those[0]) it was Shadow DOM v0, the original deprecated Chrome-only predecessor to Web Components. Except it has been removed from Chrome now so I don't think this is an issue anymore. [0]: https://caniuse.com/custom-elementsv1 https://caniuse.com/custom-elementsv1
- silvestrov 5y ago
  YouTube even fakes FCP by initially showing a lot of dummy grey boxes until they have any idea of what to really show.
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    These so-called skeleton screens are a common technique and not inherently bad. When you know an elements exact dimensions but not its contents and have more important things to serve first, it’s completely valid to use. It gets infuriating when these grey boxes animate about but them decide not to display anything anyway and just collapse. Or they load and load and load and not account for network errors. Or when the box sizes has nothing to do with the size of the element it’s being a placeholder for.
amelius 5y ago
This limit of 4 seconds, is that on some specific hardware? Or does Google make this relative to the user's hardware? (I.e., the user who is doing the search)
- SimianLogic2 5y ago
  The desktop performance targets are easy to hit, but mobile tests for Lighthouse are rough: "Simulated Fast 3G" network throttling and a 4x CPU slowdown. I don't know anyone in the US who is still on 3G and modern CPUs are not 4x slower than their desktop counterparts.
  - di4na 5y ago
    Guess what, Google does not sell mostly to the US! Also modern CPUs on mobile are faaaaaar slower than 4x the desktop one for the majority of the world.
    - buu700 5y ago
      If we broaden "desktop" to include laptops, and assuming we're talking about common/mid-range consumer devices rather than e.g. spec'd out gaming machines, GP's point seems to hold up. It's still wild to me that the 2013 MacBook Pro that was my daily driver until recently is neck-and-neck on Geekbench with both my Pixel 5 (whose CPU is considered mid-range) and the old iPhone 7 that I use as a test device. It's decisively slower than every iPhone since version 8. If we move ahead to modern desktops: it looks like iPhones have typically been only 20 - 25% slower than iPad Pros released in the same years, and this year's iPad Pro literally has a desktop processor in it (not even just a laptop processor, now that the iMac uses M1 too). Based on that, in order for your claim to be true, the majority of the world outside the US would have to be using outdated or very low-end mobile devices and/or modern souped-up desktops that blow the average American's machine out of the water. Some googling shows that a popular phone in India is the Redmi 8, which is pretty low-end even compared to the Pixel 5, and scores about half the 2013 MBP at multi-core and slightly above 25% at single-core. If the average owner of a phone like this also happened to own a modern (not 8-year-old) mid-range consumer laptop, I could see 4x being overly optimistic.
amanzi 5y ago
It infuriates me when Google search result pages jump around as I'm trying to click on links!
tonetheman 5y ago
It would be nice if any of the web vitals were actually tied to conversion or bounce rates. I have used the web for a long time and how long a page loads generally does not matter to me. Perhaps I am alone in that? No amount of javascript squishing will matter if the network from you to the origin site is slow to start with.
SimianLogic2 5y ago
I've been doing a lot of this work over the last month and LCP has been the hardest metric to move by far. I ended up dropping AdSense on mobile entirely from my site, which was ironically the biggest factor in performance degradation across a number of the stats they track.
- sa3dany 5y ago
  Does it have to load early though, if possible you can load it on demand after the page has fully loaded.
  - SimianLogic2 5y ago
    My site's not huge and mobile ads were only ~$150/mo. I might revisit it later, but for now I'm willing to take the path of least resistance.
- aabbcc1241 5y ago
  With FLoC, the website page can get user interest without loading adsense nor using 3rd party data brokers. That may helps reducing workload on page load.
baybal2 5y ago
The cumulative amount of popups on Google websites, and apps has been unbearable for quite some time.
donohoe 5y ago
I don't take this as "Google doesn't care about UX" or performance as some comments suggest. Google is a large company and its not one unified team working on various projects in exact sync. That said, as Google will start promoting non-AMP content that passes Coe Web Page Vitals, its become a bigger deal. I work in media and CLS is a big problem. Most publishers don't come close to passing. As of writing only 5 out of the 80 I track score above 80! (Out of 100, and higher is better) The publication I run Product/Engineering for hovers around 84 to 85 and we don't have ads. Full list: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ To save you a click, the top 10 are: Rank Site Score Speed-Index FCP LCP Int TBT 1 ThoughtCo 87 1856 1.6 s 2.0 s 6.5 s 345 ms 2 The Markup 86 3621 2.4 s 3.5 s 3.5 s 95 ms 3 Rest of World 84 3154 1.9 s 4.0 s 4.3 s 79 ms 4 Investopedia 81 2009 1.6 s 1.9 s 6.5 s 552 ms 5 The Spruce 80 1877 1.3 s 1.9 s 6.7 s 634 ms Bottom 5 are... Rank Site Score Speed-Index FCP LCP Int TBT 77 CNN 11 31408 6.2 s 35.7 s 70.5 s 17,666 ms 78 Seattle PI 10 27902 6.4 s 14.6 s 57.1 s 11,687 ms 79 SFGate 9 41064 7.4 s 31.1 s 96.7 s 24,437 ms 80 NY Mag 8 18222 6.0 s 10.8 s 41.1 s 7,157 ms 81 Teen Vogue 8 22549 3.4 s 9.1 s 42.3 s 8,968 ms If you want to help me get our Score to 95 or higher, I am hiring frontend developers :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358113
- walshemj 5y ago
  Even google has its own SEO teams and they are not immune to the developers messing up. And you need technical SEO's not more front end devs cranking out the frame work dejour
- VHRanger 5y ago
  restofworld.org living up to their name and are accessible in the rest of the world Good on them
  - donohoe 5y ago
    Thats very nice of you to say. We're trying our best but have more work to do.
secondcoming 5y ago
As a daily user of Google's Cloud Platform web UI, this doesn't surprise me in the least!
- cube00 5y ago
  I was willing to cut some slack because I'm sure some operations actually take time on the back end (eg. create a VM) but even browsing read only pages make my laptop fan spin up like no other web site does.
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    I'm sure thety do, but when doing something like removing an instance from an Instance Group you can never be 100% certain that it actually was removed without several refreshes. Switching to a different project can give you, for example, a list on instances belonging to the previous project. It's just not what I'd expect from Google considering what they pay engineers.
nailer 5y ago
Direct link: https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ Dang might want to fix it if he reads this.
alpaca128 5y ago
> It's causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test. Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX? You'll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can't render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of "tradeoff" every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser's job of arranging the 20 layers of <div>s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails. And I'm absolutely not surprised Google's pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I'm a zoomer and wasn't even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept. But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites. This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that's not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > When not using an ad blocker why would any sane person ever do this? oh right, mobile. so let me ask a different way: why would any sane person ever browse the web on any platform that does not have effective ad blocking?
uses 5y ago
One of the frustrating things about being a web developer is that I can do a ton of advanced optimization to the point of code splitting my js with dynamic import() or doing page level caching, lazyloading, and splitting non-critical CSS. But other departments of my org can squash it by adding a chat plugin with a disgusting level of resource abuse which obliterates all the advances I've made. My approach is to just explain what I can or can't do, and explain the trade-offs for everything. I'll give the decision-makers the info but I'm not going to be the curmudgeon going to war over something the marketing people say we need to survive.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  DNS resolution 12ms First-byte time 64ms CSS & JavaScript 148ms Analytics 3,157ms Images 250ms someone who is good at the web please help me budget this. my store is slow
  - cocoafleck 5y ago
    Well clearly we can't remove analytics, and if we changed analytics to a different (faster) provider someone would have a cow... We could lower our image sizes, but let's be honest that would result in the dreaded JPGing. Our Javascript is a hand crafted wonder that we just rebuilt for the 6th time in the past decade in a new modern better framework so clearly that cannot be the problem. Therefore I'm leaning towards adding a CDN to lower the first byte time, or yelling at our DNS provider to speed up their side. /s
  - easrng 5y ago
    Just load the analytics async, ezpz
defanor 5y ago
Sad-yet-amusing fact: apparently most of the W3C member [0] websites can't pass the W3 HTML validator [1], for some years now (possibly it was the case for as long as both existed). With that in mind, failures to pass fairly complex tests for things conceived recently, which everyone isn't supposed to follow, are far from surprising. [0] https://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html https://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html [1] https://validator.w3.org/ https://validator.w3.org/
est 5y ago
Alternatively one department's product conflicts with another department's tool.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
katzgrau 5y ago
Not totally surprising. A lot of things Google is officially opposed to concerning their "Better Ads Coalition" are things you routinely see in Google Search and Google Display Network. From the outside, Google looks more and more like an indifferent, multi-headed monster with competing agendas by the day.
Ekaros 5y ago
I really don't understand how poorly it seems that some websites and browsers are doing even in environments that they have no right to have issues. Like sufficient or high amounts of everything from CPU, GPU, RAM and network...
Vinnl 5y ago
I like Nolan Lawson's take [1] that this is a good thing, at least when it comes to the test itself: they're willing to push other teams at Google to improve (rather than lowering the bar for everyone else). I guess you could argue that they should've done that pushing internally, but that's really a concern only for Google itself. As long as it works, it's a win for users. [1] https://toot.cafe/@nolan/106358723424552836 https://toot.cafe/@nolan/106358723424552836
shireboy 5y ago
I’ve struggled with this. Lighthouse is a great tool but the things it dings me most on: google ads, google fonts, and google maps.
deeblering4 5y ago
This is also the case if your site has doubleclick ads or similar, they are the slowest part of the page by a significant amount. In my experience a site got a lighthouse score of ~50 with doubleclick ads enabled, and a score of 100 with my network ad blocker enabled. Truly infuriating that they penalize you for using their own solutions. And of course G has no support to speak of to help report or remedy the problem.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  It's been a long time since I've looked at integrating ads on a website, but there are far better ways to do it than just throwing up a script tag nowadays. Have you looked into those?
dundarious 5y ago
A valid criticism is that Google's own products will presumably not be penalized in search results for these low scores. I'm happy to be wrong on that assumption, of course, but I think it's a reasonable one to make, and it severely dampens my willingness to agree that Google deserves praise for setting a high bar that it must itself struggle to reach in order to provide real value to users.
offsky 5y ago
I wish google would optimize Adsense for Core Vitals. My site gets a 100 score without ads and a score of 80 with Adsense. I’m not willing to give up the ad revenue.
awinter-py 5y ago
no website hoses a browser / laptop faster than the adwords dashboard I looked into it once -- it's some kind of shitty CPU bound loop in dart-to-js logic we're talking 10-second pauses on an older mac, full crashes on a linux laptop prone to OOM. This is for a site that does one or two basic crud actions. Few other websites do this and adwords is the most consistent offender, i.e. the worst.
wilsonthewhale 5y ago
I tried a couple pages from SourceHut, which famously prides itself on its fast performance. The projects page (dynamic, changes with user activity on the site) https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects: 100 A patch page https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/23162 https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/23162: 99 A source page https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/pages.sr.ht/tree/master/item/server.go https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/pages.sr.ht/tree/master/item/ser...: 100 SourceHut often "feels" a bit slower in that the browser does a full navigation whenever you click, but the absolute time is definitely low and I applaud them from building such a fast (and accessible!) experience.
6510 5y ago
Its just not your computer anymore - in countless ways. Processing user input should come before anything else, second is displaying what the user wants. To state the obvious: You should be able to click around in a menu (that doesn't jump all over the place) and switch between content before it is fully loaded. Almost nothing does this. You have to use things like <a> and <form>, features from back when it was your computer.
cush 5y ago
I've noticed that the Cumulative Latout Shift test reports failures when scrolling in Monaco Editor and other VList implementations. Monaco has buttery smooth scrolling even in giant files.
jscheel 5y ago
There is a long-standing bug in lighthouse where out-of-process iframes are counted against the main thread. This causes major degradation in lighthouse scores. Even YouTube’s own iframe embed is affected. You could have a perfect-scoring page, put a YouTube embed on it, and the score will be decimated.
IYasha 5y ago
It's a sad thing what current Web turned into. Google docs spreadsheets are taking 2 to 3 minutes to load on my laptop. IMHO, people shouldn't drag everything into the browser just because they can.

374 points by EvgeniyZh 5y ago

For once, I think this is a good initiative from google. Most websites are over-bloated and this is a good incentive to move the web in the right direction.

amelius 5y ago
Would you also think of it as a good initiative if the US government demanded the change? I don't know. To me it sounds a bit like "you can only be in the AppStore if your app meets these requirements". If Google was pure in its reasoning, they would allow slow pages to still be listed high in search results for people who don't care about page load times.
- johnnypangs 5y ago
  It seems like this is the case. There is a link to a more informative article in the Reddit post that has a spokesperson from google who says that if you’re the most relevant, you’re going to still be ranked well. Article link: https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/
  - amelius 5y ago
    Ok, let's extend this. If two pages are equally relevant and equally fast, will they show me the page with the fewest advertisements first? And why is speed more important than number of advertisements?
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Fortunately, speed is almost always inversely proportional to number of ads! So the two mostly go hand in hand, for sites with similar content.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  I think the best approach would be to show a small indicator of page load times in the search results so everyone can decide for themelves what they prefer. Then these preferences would influence what is shown on top, creating an optimisation feedback cycle.
- threeseed 5y ago
  > for people who don't care about page load times. And I am sure there is an incredibly high percentage of people who love nothing more than slow web sites.
  - amelius 5y ago
    If they are ad-free and tracking-free, then you can give me slow web sites.
    - alserio 5y ago
      For some strange reason ad-free and tracking-free sites are usually faster...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- EqScr9a3 5y ago
  There is an enormous difference between a demand from a government that would be backed up by the threat of violence and anything Google is doing. You are free to ignore Google without any risk of being shot or imprisoned.
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    Yep, the only possibility is that your business might be destroyed, you might be bankrupt, and your family needs to start again from zero.

fauigerzigerk 5y ago

>Cumulative layout shift is supposed to measure whether your site shifts around while it's loading, but it's so strict that even Google Translate fails the test. And so it should be. There's hardly anything worse than having things shift around after you start reading, scrolling or clicking on something. I think it's a very good sign if Google's own sites fail these tests. It means the tests are meaningful.

rsynnott 5y ago
On the other hand, it means that Google has stopped caring about UI performance. Of course, anyone who’s used Google Groups lately could tell you that.
- trasz 5y ago
  Priority is the ads display performance; search or news are just an addition to the actual business.
- sim_card_map 5y ago
  or Gmail for the last 10 years
- refulgentis 5y ago
  I'm not sure its reasonable to jump from "Google Translate has a jump' to "Google has stopped caring about UI performance"
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    As I say, compare Google Groups today to Google Groups 10 years ago. Or gmail. Or Calendar. Though Groups is possibly the best example, as it went, more or less overnight, from one of Google's snappiest properties to about its most sluggish. Google used to be very concerned about UI performance, but they seem to have totally lost interest in it.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  My theory is that they test this on their 10 Gbit company network, and high-end laptops, and it works great. So it's hard to convince anyone that it's a problem.

butz 5y ago

While improving performance is a good goal, chasing after perfect scores in Google tests sometimes leads to increased complexity of code, bugs on older browsers and even bigger website size.

citrin_ru 5y ago
Goodhart's law works here too: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One should consider all factors before making a change and don't blindly target the test score only.

Evidlo 5y ago

Is there somewhere I can paste my website URL to test it with Web Vitals?

topicseed 5y ago
Sure, go ahead at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fouronnes3 5y ago
https://web.dev/measure/ https://web.dev/measure/
- lucgommans 5y ago
  I wonder where they measure from, as it claims >1 second of loading time for what is ~500ms in my browser. And my browser is also absurdly slow, now that I look at it. The HTML at https://lucgommans.nl https://lucgommans.nl is 978 bytes, the CSS 2KB, and the ping 39ms. With DNS+TCP+TLS+HTTP, the HTML downloads in 159ms. And then it waits. And waits. Then, after 134ms, it decides that DOM content has been loaded and fires the DOMContentLoaded event (there is no JS on the page). And then it waits some more, until after waiting 177ms it decides to start downloading the CSS which finishes in 44ms. And then it waits again for 40ms, downloads the 33KB background image in 80ms, and finally clocks the total loading time at 508ms. How fast should it be? The loading times are 283ms altogether (sequentially), how long does parsing 3KB of data take on a modern CPU? Close to zero right? I remember in iirc ~2007-2015, quite regularly there would be news that browser X had optimized the DOM parser, or rewritten the JavaScript engine, or cut off some time with this or that. What even is going on here, did all this go out the window with the multi-process browser where it has to talk to other processes to get things done, or what's up with all this waiting? Does anyone know?
  - 5y ago

rasz 5y ago

Im actually surprised how good YT comes out in this. The page is a dumpster fire: Before Polymer (current YT framework) YT video page weighted somewhere around 50KB (10KB compressed) and was ordinary HTML + 1MB js player (400KB compressed). As soon as HTML part loaded the page was all there. Now its 600KB (100KB compressed) JSON + additional 8MB desktop_polymer.js (1MB compressed) that needs to be compiled/interpreted before it even starts building the page client side and anything starts showing up. 1MB js player is on top of that.

zelphirkalt 5y ago
"Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself."
kevingadd 5y ago
It's astonishing how much worse they made it - and intentionally made it worse in browsers without Web Components, like Firefox. Forcing the old non-Polymer website was like hitting the turbo button on an old PC.
- easrng 5y ago
  It wasn't Web Components (Firefox supports those[0]) it was Shadow DOM v0, the original deprecated Chrome-only predecessor to Web Components. Except it has been removed from Chrome now so I don't think this is an issue anymore. [0]: https://caniuse.com/custom-elementsv1 https://caniuse.com/custom-elementsv1
silvestrov 5y ago
YouTube even fakes FCP by initially showing a lot of dummy grey boxes until they have any idea of what to really show.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  These so-called skeleton screens are a common technique and not inherently bad. When you know an elements exact dimensions but not its contents and have more important things to serve first, it’s completely valid to use. It gets infuriating when these grey boxes animate about but them decide not to display anything anyway and just collapse. Or they load and load and load and not account for network errors. Or when the box sizes has nothing to do with the size of the element it’s being a placeholder for.

amelius 5y ago

This limit of 4 seconds, is that on some specific hardware? Or does Google make this relative to the user's hardware? (I.e., the user who is doing the search)

SimianLogic2 5y ago
The desktop performance targets are easy to hit, but mobile tests for Lighthouse are rough: "Simulated Fast 3G" network throttling and a 4x CPU slowdown. I don't know anyone in the US who is still on 3G and modern CPUs are not 4x slower than their desktop counterparts.
- di4na 5y ago
  Guess what, Google does not sell mostly to the US! Also modern CPUs on mobile are faaaaaar slower than 4x the desktop one for the majority of the world.
  - buu700 5y ago
    If we broaden "desktop" to include laptops, and assuming we're talking about common/mid-range consumer devices rather than e.g. spec'd out gaming machines, GP's point seems to hold up. It's still wild to me that the 2013 MacBook Pro that was my daily driver until recently is neck-and-neck on Geekbench with both my Pixel 5 (whose CPU is considered mid-range) and the old iPhone 7 that I use as a test device. It's decisively slower than every iPhone since version 8. If we move ahead to modern desktops: it looks like iPhones have typically been only 20 - 25% slower than iPad Pros released in the same years, and this year's iPad Pro literally has a desktop processor in it (not even just a laptop processor, now that the iMac uses M1 too). Based on that, in order for your claim to be true, the majority of the world outside the US would have to be using outdated or very low-end mobile devices and/or modern souped-up desktops that blow the average American's machine out of the water. Some googling shows that a popular phone in India is the Redmi 8, which is pretty low-end even compared to the Pixel 5, and scores about half the 2013 MBP at multi-core and slightly above 25% at single-core. If the average owner of a phone like this also happened to own a modern (not 8-year-old) mid-range consumer laptop, I could see 4x being overly optimistic.

amanzi 5y ago

It infuriates me when Google search result pages jump around as I'm trying to click on links!

tonetheman 5y ago

It would be nice if any of the web vitals were actually tied to conversion or bounce rates. I have used the web for a long time and how long a page loads generally does not matter to me. Perhaps I am alone in that? No amount of javascript squishing will matter if the network from you to the origin site is slow to start with.

SimianLogic2 5y ago

I've been doing a lot of this work over the last month and LCP has been the hardest metric to move by far. I ended up dropping AdSense on mobile entirely from my site, which was ironically the biggest factor in performance degradation across a number of the stats they track.

sa3dany 5y ago
Does it have to load early though, if possible you can load it on demand after the page has fully loaded.
- SimianLogic2 5y ago
  My site's not huge and mobile ads were only ~$150/mo. I might revisit it later, but for now I'm willing to take the path of least resistance.
aabbcc1241 5y ago
With FLoC, the website page can get user interest without loading adsense nor using 3rd party data brokers. That may helps reducing workload on page load.

baybal2 5y ago

The cumulative amount of popups on Google websites, and apps has been unbearable for quite some time.

donohoe 5y ago

I don't take this as "Google doesn't care about UX" or performance as some comments suggest. Google is a large company and its not one unified team working on various projects in exact sync. That said, as Google will start promoting non-AMP content that passes Coe Web Page Vitals, its become a bigger deal. I work in media and CLS is a big problem. Most publishers don't come close to passing. As of writing only 5 out of the 80 I track score above 80! (Out of 100, and higher is better) The publication I run Product/Engineering for hovers around 84 to 85 and we don't have ads. Full list: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ To save you a click, the top 10 are: Rank Site Score Speed-Index FCP LCP Int TBT 1 ThoughtCo 87 1856 1.6 s 2.0 s 6.5 s 345 ms 2 The Markup 86 3621 2.4 s 3.5 s 3.5 s 95 ms 3 Rest of World 84 3154 1.9 s 4.0 s 4.3 s 79 ms 4 Investopedia 81 2009 1.6 s 1.9 s 6.5 s 552 ms 5 The Spruce 80 1877 1.3 s 1.9 s 6.7 s 634 ms Bottom 5 are... Rank Site Score Speed-Index FCP LCP Int TBT 77 CNN 11 31408 6.2 s 35.7 s 70.5 s 17,666 ms 78 Seattle PI 10 27902 6.4 s 14.6 s 57.1 s 11,687 ms 79 SFGate 9 41064 7.4 s 31.1 s 96.7 s 24,437 ms 80 NY Mag 8 18222 6.0 s 10.8 s 41.1 s 7,157 ms 81 Teen Vogue 8 22549 3.4 s 9.1 s 42.3 s 8,968 ms If you want to help me get our Score to 95 or higher, I am hiring frontend developers :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358113

walshemj 5y ago
Even google has its own SEO teams and they are not immune to the developers messing up. And you need technical SEO's not more front end devs cranking out the frame work dejour
VHRanger 5y ago
restofworld.org living up to their name and are accessible in the rest of the world Good on them
- donohoe 5y ago
  Thats very nice of you to say. We're trying our best but have more work to do.

secondcoming 5y ago

As a daily user of Google's Cloud Platform web UI, this doesn't surprise me in the least!

cube00 5y ago
I was willing to cut some slack because I'm sure some operations actually take time on the back end (eg. create a VM) but even browsing read only pages make my laptop fan spin up like no other web site does.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  I'm sure thety do, but when doing something like removing an instance from an Instance Group you can never be 100% certain that it actually was removed without several refreshes. Switching to a different project can give you, for example, a list on instances belonging to the previous project. It's just not what I'd expect from Google considering what they pay engineers.

nailer 5y ago

Direct link: https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ https://www.ntara.com/google-core-web-vitals/ Dang might want to fix it if he reads this.

alpaca128 5y ago

> It's causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test. Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX? You'll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can't render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of "tradeoff" every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser's job of arranging the 20 layers of <div>s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails. And I'm absolutely not surprised Google's pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.

eric__cartman 5y ago
The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I'm a zoomer and wasn't even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept. But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites. This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that's not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > When not using an ad blocker why would any sane person ever do this? oh right, mobile. so let me ask a different way: why would any sane person ever browse the web on any platform that does not have effective ad blocking?

uses 5y ago

One of the frustrating things about being a web developer is that I can do a ton of advanced optimization to the point of code splitting my js with dynamic import() or doing page level caching, lazyloading, and splitting non-critical CSS. But other departments of my org can squash it by adding a chat plugin with a disgusting level of resource abuse which obliterates all the advances I've made. My approach is to just explain what I can or can't do, and explain the trade-offs for everything. I'll give the decision-makers the info but I'm not going to be the curmudgeon going to war over something the marketing people say we need to survive.

kmeisthax 5y ago
DNS resolution 12ms First-byte time 64ms CSS & JavaScript 148ms Analytics 3,157ms Images 250ms someone who is good at the web please help me budget this. my store is slow
- cocoafleck 5y ago
  Well clearly we can't remove analytics, and if we changed analytics to a different (faster) provider someone would have a cow... We could lower our image sizes, but let's be honest that would result in the dreaded JPGing. Our Javascript is a hand crafted wonder that we just rebuilt for the 6th time in the past decade in a new modern better framework so clearly that cannot be the problem. Therefore I'm leaning towards adding a CDN to lower the first byte time, or yelling at our DNS provider to speed up their side. /s
- easrng 5y ago
  Just load the analytics async, ezpz

defanor 5y ago

Sad-yet-amusing fact: apparently most of the W3C member [0] websites can't pass the W3 HTML validator [1], for some years now (possibly it was the case for as long as both existed). With that in mind, failures to pass fairly complex tests for things conceived recently, which everyone isn't supposed to follow, are far from surprising. [0] https://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html https://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html [1] https://validator.w3.org/ https://validator.w3.org/

est 5y ago

Alternatively one department's product conflicts with another department's tool.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

katzgrau 5y ago

Not totally surprising. A lot of things Google is officially opposed to concerning their "Better Ads Coalition" are things you routinely see in Google Search and Google Display Network. From the outside, Google looks more and more like an indifferent, multi-headed monster with competing agendas by the day.

Ekaros 5y ago

I really don't understand how poorly it seems that some websites and browsers are doing even in environments that they have no right to have issues. Like sufficient or high amounts of everything from CPU, GPU, RAM and network...

Vinnl 5y ago

I like Nolan Lawson's take [1] that this is a good thing, at least when it comes to the test itself: they're willing to push other teams at Google to improve (rather than lowering the bar for everyone else). I guess you could argue that they should've done that pushing internally, but that's really a concern only for Google itself. As long as it works, it's a win for users. [1] https://toot.cafe/@nolan/106358723424552836 https://toot.cafe/@nolan/106358723424552836

shireboy 5y ago

I’ve struggled with this. Lighthouse is a great tool but the things it dings me most on: google ads, google fonts, and google maps.

deeblering4 5y ago

This is also the case if your site has doubleclick ads or similar, they are the slowest part of the page by a significant amount. In my experience a site got a lighthouse score of ~50 with doubleclick ads enabled, and a score of 100 with my network ad blocker enabled. Truly infuriating that they penalize you for using their own solutions. And of course G has no support to speak of to help report or remedy the problem.

throwaway3699 5y ago
It's been a long time since I've looked at integrating ads on a website, but there are far better ways to do it than just throwing up a script tag nowadays. Have you looked into those?

dundarious 5y ago

A valid criticism is that Google's own products will presumably not be penalized in search results for these low scores. I'm happy to be wrong on that assumption, of course, but I think it's a reasonable one to make, and it severely dampens my willingness to agree that Google deserves praise for setting a high bar that it must itself struggle to reach in order to provide real value to users.

offsky 5y ago

I wish google would optimize Adsense for Core Vitals. My site gets a 100 score without ads and a score of 80 with Adsense. I’m not willing to give up the ad revenue.

awinter-py 5y ago

no website hoses a browser / laptop faster than the adwords dashboard I looked into it once -- it's some kind of shitty CPU bound loop in dart-to-js logic we're talking 10-second pauses on an older mac, full crashes on a linux laptop prone to OOM. This is for a site that does one or two basic crud actions. Few other websites do this and adwords is the most consistent offender, i.e. the worst.

wilsonthewhale 5y ago

I tried a couple pages from SourceHut, which famously prides itself on its fast performance. The projects page (dynamic, changes with user activity on the site) https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects: 100 A patch page https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/23162 https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/23162: 99 A source page https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/pages.sr.ht/tree/master/item/server.go https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/pages.sr.ht/tree/master/item/ser...: 100 SourceHut often "feels" a bit slower in that the browser does a full navigation whenever you click, but the absolute time is definitely low and I applaud them from building such a fast (and accessible!) experience.

6510 5y ago

Its just not your computer anymore - in countless ways. Processing user input should come before anything else, second is displaying what the user wants. To state the obvious: You should be able to click around in a menu (that doesn't jump all over the place) and switch between content before it is fully loaded. Almost nothing does this. You have to use things like <a> and <form>, features from back when it was your computer.

cush 5y ago

I've noticed that the Cumulative Latout Shift test reports failures when scrolling in Monaco Editor and other VList implementations. Monaco has buttery smooth scrolling even in giant files.

jscheel 5y ago

There is a long-standing bug in lighthouse where out-of-process iframes are counted against the main thread. This causes major degradation in lighthouse scores. Even YouTube’s own iframe embed is affected. You could have a perfect-scoring page, put a YouTube embed on it, and the score will be decimated.

IYasha 5y ago

It's a sad thing what current Web turned into. Google docs spreadsheets are taking 2 to 3 minutes to load on my laptop. IMHO, people shouldn't drag everything into the browser just because they can.