Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool

testmysite.withgoogle.com

136 pointsnatvert63 comments

Dark pattern pet peeve once you complete the test. The options are either:

  Yes, send me my report and occasional emails with helpful
  tips on how to improve my online presence. Google may send
  me recommendations for certain Google products and services
  and contact me with further help and tips based on my
  TestMySite results.

Or:

  No thanks, I don’t want to get my detailed results.

What if I want to get my results, but not subscribe to your marketing drip campaign?

Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/csm6j5u9hq5wubw/Screenshot%202017-...

The quid pro quo bit seems pretty standard and reasonable, annoying but reasonable

Yes it is.

But then again, providing the user with a unique shareable URL would be much better for the user.

And, this is just my own opinion[1], obviously, but, providing the best user experience possible, whether designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage is very important. It is wise to take great care to ensure that services will ultimately serve the user, rather than the provider's internal goal or bottom line. When building new tools and applications, they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

[1] well not really mine... https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

Annoying as hell. Might use a throwaway address.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

I was able to just scroll down and click on "view the details" and "see what to fix" in each section.

I assumed that the detailed report would probably have more information about the "what to fix" shown on the page in sections, and also "how to fix" with relevant snippets on the web page. If that's not the case, I don't see why a detailed report is even there.

I did not opt for a detailed report because it requires an email address and defaults to opt-in for additional communications. It's really a terrible dark pattern. I wonder who even thought that this would be acceptable.

Submit it to http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com

Dark pattern pet peeve once you click the screenshot. Why does dropbox plaster its login form to completely cover the image?

I can show you what you get if you sign up:

http://imgur.com/a/QlLws

This "detailed report" is quite lacking in detail compared to the Pagespeed it's apparently going to replace, because pagespeed at least lists the pages it's upset about.

Only by viewing the old tool can I see that what it's actually complaining about, is the CDN configuration for Google analytics.

I wish these Google tools would at least recognise people following their own instructions and not punish them accordingly.

I ran it on a tiny static 99.9% text-only site that finishes loading in 0.15s, a full 0.1s of which is a 1.5KB creative commons graphic, and google knocks 9 points off on mobile because I don't defer the 8ms request for 374 bytes of CSS? Seems arbitrary.

PageSpeed, which this is based on, uses a relative metric last I checked. I.E. If you have a 2 byte site and can remove 1 byte, you'd get ~50 points off.

It's not quite that simple, but that's the basic idea.

Sadly, I think, it is that simple.

> 374 bytes of CSS

Put it <style> tags in the <head>. No reason to use an external file for so little. It's not worth the overhead.

That's certainly true, but to his point - it's an 8ms call - is it worth the number of points Google knocks off?

If it's on http2 and/or preloaded that certainly isn't true.

Counterpoint, there's no reason to uglify something simple and clean by copy-pasting CSS into it to just to shave the remaining hairs off the dog's balls* when we already have a nice interface for read-once-use-everywhere references.

* - I don't know if that's a real expression. It doesn't even seem to fit, but I like it so I'mma keep it.

What size cutoff would you use for the <style> tag? In other words, at what point is the tradeoff worth it?

I think its around 30kb.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/08/understanding-criti...

It doesn't necessarily have to be about size. The goal is to let the browser paint the above-the-fold content without any external round-trips. Using the least possible seams sensible, especially if you do it on every page. This lets caching work as intended for the majority of the CSS.

I do it for sizes less than 10KB (completely arbitrary) for most websites because the fact of the matter is that most websites don't get repeat visits often, and visitors rarely visit more than the page/article they arrived at.

There's no point making all visitors cache a CSS file when only a tiny minority will need it.

Note that I live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so HTTP round-trip times are terrible for most users. If you're on a first-world connection, it shouldn't matter as much.

This is exactly why I stopped using page speed insights for testing. The last time I used it, which was at least a year ago, I was losing points for serving too large an image file size on mobile. Only problem was I use converting to webp 'on the fly' with mobile browsers.

I could kind of get it if webp was an apple or ms solution but it isn't??

Especially arbitrary when considering their own website gets points knocked off: https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/

They remembered to cover Google.com (it gets perfect scores), but forgot the testing site itself.

Youtube gets 54/100 on mobile speed and 70/100 on desktop..

The site itself is an abomination on a low end pc. That thing lags, drop frames, etc.

And it pretends to have a better score than a static html page without any ressources.

I only see 79/100 mobile friendliness for google.com (tried two times with same results).

The screenshot shows some text among the lines of "We're sorry... ...but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. [...]". It looks like some kind of abuse/DoS protection was triggered.

> Seems arbitrary

It's always going to be arbitrary to have an absolute measure given the diversity of sites. Large/slow images are going to be normal for photography sites for example but worth knocking points off for coding sites. You're better off using it as a relative measure to see if the same site is improving when you make changes.

The PageSpeed Insights[0] tool is better. Less scrolling to see results, actionable steps to fix issues and no scroll hijacking. Also seems to scan websites quicker.

[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

This is just a pretty version more focussed on consumers with little tech background.

PageSpeed Insights has a banner stating to use this new option, indicating it will become the only option in the future.

I find testing using these types of tools better, as it gives a real world performance metric (actual load times) https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dJNbUe/www.instapainting.com

You should try http://mobitest.akamai.com/m/index.cgi or http://webpagetest.org instead for accurate results.

Speaking to some of the Google developers and the head of mobile web performance - not even Google use their own tool as a measure / benchmark for performance. PageSpeed Insights is both broken and convoluted at best.

- No support for HTTP/2 -- This means that if you follow all the "right" approaches for performance with HTTP/2, you'll be slapped with a terrible PageSpeed score due to it not taking into account the effect of multi plexing connections. - Has constant bugs around determining the flow of assets on the page and thinks that assets at the bottom become render blocking when they do not

Google tend to use a combination of their own tooling + WebPageTest.org (which is also theirs) to test performance issues.

This tool is mainly geared at the non-developer type, but it's unfortunately misleading and just wrong. It doesn't measure speed, it measures performance methodologies and whether they have been implemented or not (and old ones at that).

The more important metrics are time to paint, time to domcontentready. Using WebPageTest will get you what you want. I find it pretty offensive and misleading that Google is using such a tool and promoting it to users, because frankly it misses the entire point of performance.

Things like this: "Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content" when you're running an H/2 site with an appcache and pushing assets is just downright wrong.

It's sad that there's a general miscommunication within the company about performance. Ilya Gregorik and co say one thing, and the rest say another.

"withgoogle.com" looks like a phishing domain. What's wrong with subdomains?

I had to whois them

Different security requirements. I believe anything under google.com is subject to quite strict rules.

I don't understand. Why not simply use PageSpeed where it tells you exactly what to fix to improve each aspect?

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

They seem to be in the process of replacing PageSpeed.

First:

> PageSpeed Insights has moved the User Experience test for mobile pages into the Mobile Friendly Test

And then a bigger launch about this fancier version.

Mobile Friendly(MF) is worse than PageSpeed Insights(PSI) in every possible (perceivable) way:

- PSI is fast. MF is slow.

- PSI is general (mobile and desktop). MF is, well, for mobile.

- PSI just asks for the site, gives you results. MF checks if you're a robot, you check a site, and checks again you're not a robot if you want to use it again.

- PSI gives you exactly what's wrong with your site, which rules were broken, and how to fix them. Which lines to add to your CSS. Where to add them (deferring loading CSS if you want to, adding JavaScript), and gives you a score for each thing, if you change stuff you can look at your score improve. It then orients you to resources for additional reading. MF is binary: good, not good. Doesn't give you info. Doesn't give you actionable info. Gives you basically nothing.

I don't see any reason to use MF (or for it to even exist under its current form and non-features) and every reason to use PSI. Then again, every time I discover a Google product, after a few days I have the misfortune of seeing a red warning telling me it'll be discontinued. It's happened many times.

Looks like a nice skin on top of the existing PageSpeed tools

Meh, they make you sign up with email to see full results.

If it provides the scores I'm assuming it also has detailed information on how those scores were calculated. Why not provide the detailed results right away instead of collecting emails. Every time I see "Get Something Free" or something similar my bullshit meter starts peaking right away.

Neat, I had it report on itself..

  DESKTOP SPEED 96/100 GOOD
  MOBILE SPEED 94/100 GOOD
  MOBILE FRIENDLINESS 100/100 GOOD

http://www.google.com/ gets 100 out of 100 for everything.

hahahaha, it looks like they hit their own captcha! http://i.imgur.com/cnPWqwz.png

http://imgur.com/tRkHsPA They seem to be using chrome 27.

Just tried it out, now waiting for the reports.

It'd be nice if they let me sign in with my Google account, so I can generate multiple reports without having to repeatedly type in my email. It seems reasonable to assume that anyone that uses a tool like this would likely have multiple pages or sites they'd want to check, no?

I tested reddit (which I hate using on mobile), and it got a Poor 63/100 for speed while high marks for mobile optimization. I guess it's a perfect representation of many SPAs out there. Fancy JS frameworks that are built for mobile, but it takes 10s+ to load if you're not on Wifi/4G.

Ironically this site does not work correctly for me on my phone. On the latest stable safari and iOS version the field to enter your email to get the report is missing. No ad blockers enabled etc...

They say that more people surf the web on mobile than on desktop.

Does anyone has some more data on this? What do they include in 'mobile', also tablets?

I surf on my phone a lot but I still surf on my notebook as well, actually the entire day at the office

Have you considered this might include China, India, etc., you know, outside the US? :)

https://www.techinasia.com/china-mobile-internet-users-stati...

Dear Google,

Stripping metadata from images is _not_ optimization. Please stop recommending this.

That site uses my speakers on mobile chrome. Does anyone know why?

It plays a video, even though it has no sound your browser will show a speaker icon.

Hm... It doesn't return anything for my site. It runs the tests, says 100% done, then returns to the home-screen without an input field.

Anyone else?

yep, me. using firefox developer edition

I'm using FF non-dev edition. Wonder what is causing it.

I had to disable my adblocker for it to not do that.

Hmmm. didn't seem to work for me, but thanks

When you test google.com with this, you get captchas as a preview.

And I guess the captcha page is what this tests then.

"Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content"

What does this mean exactly?

This means any CSS or JS that delays ("blocks") rendering of "above-the-fold content" (content you see immediately - before scrolling) should be removed or made non-blocking.

ahh ok got it thanks

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