Hacker News Reader

Comment by svnpenn | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Would you take webdev advice from a company where their own apps are memory hog/leaking garbage (Gmail)? At some point you need to call a square a square.

View on HN

If you disagree with the advice on web.dev then that's fine. Call that out. Saying that the advice is wrong because another team in another building, maybe in another city or another country, built an app you don't like, is just wrong. This sort of ad hominem is beneath HN.

Yet it seems excusing corporate hypocrisy and inconsistency based on size and employee location to be par for the course.

Sorry, I'm not letting you get away with an illogical argument here. There's nothing hypocritical about the authors of web.dev making an auditing tool because some other people who work for the same company work on site that (may) do badly.

In fact, it wouldn't be hypocritical even if the authors of web.dev themselves worked on a site that did badly.

It is, after all, a tool. It's not a declaration of superior intellect. It's not an article of condescension. It's a tool.

The hypocritical statement is on the part of the company, not the specific authors. The efforts represent the company, as do their efforts in standards organizations, browser implementations, and email user interfaces. It is completely logical to question their inconsistencies especially as one of the primary drivers of standards. If the company cannot present a consistent front, we can ask ourselves whether their attempts to help others do so are accurate much less well intentioned. This should be obviously clear and not about individuals or their feelings.

Releasing a tool cannot be hypocritical. The existence of a tool to audit performance, accessibility, etc. is not a declaration of Google's moral or virtuous superiority. It's a tool.

Maybe the web.dev is trying to convince other teams at Google to improve their products.

Their advice isn't perfect but that doesn't mean I won't pay attention to it. Memory use and leaking isn't really covered in their page speed advice anyway, which is mostly about server side caching, image optimisation, css / js delivery.

If there's any other decent page speed assistance I'd love to see it.

> Not really. Would you take webdev advice from a company where their own apps are memory hog/leaking garbage (Gmail)? At some point you need to call a square a square.

Wait, was web.dev built by the Gmail team? I always assumed Google was bigger and more complex than that?

Yup. It’s a company that routinely breaks the web, pursues its own standards at the detroment of others and and will prioritize things like AMP over any of its own tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com