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...
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.
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.
This won't win me back from Firefox, but I don't consider it a bad move.
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.
Google lost a ton of good will by making Gmail a laughably bad experience on load.
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.
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.
The US Federal Reserve Bank does not measure inflation or unemployment. Rather, the US Department of Labour, an independent organisation (and a branch of government rather than a freestanding entity) computes both measures.
This is the principle of division of responsibility and measurement or judgement. You cut, I choose.
Google are both measuring, and rewarding, website performance, as well as designing and distributing the principle tools that benefit by both choices. That's an extreme locus of power. And, history shows, generally a Bad Idea which Ends Poorly.
Also given their market share as a search engine, they also get to decide which websites you will be able to "discover" additionally incorporating their performance metrics into their website ranking. So not only a website will get a "slow badge" but will also be downranked into oblivion.
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.
Yeah, it's been years and years since I did much browsing with an ad blocker off.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
Gmail scores a 50% on Google's own PageSpeed. And that's just the login screen. If Google can't even meet their own metrics and standards then they have no place telling other people what they should be doing with their websites.
The fact that they are failing their own if anything, shows that the tests don't discriminate. It's defeatist to say that we shouldn't strive for faster websites if some webpage fails. I really like how dumb f*s making 40MiB pages are now finally punished.
That is to say, I don't think e.g. Trello would really care if their site was "slow to load" either.
You might want to take a look at Brave, which uses Chromium underneath, has Tor built-in, is compatible with Chrome’s plugins and even has a business model based on paying people to view ads only if they opt-in: https://brave.com/features/
Or is this just a way for Google to kill off the progress bar, too?
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)
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?
> Both Android and Chrome send data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction. Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35% of all the data samples sent to Google.[0]
[0] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...
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.
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.
"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.
The previous version of PageSpeed Insights was open source (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).
(Disclosure: I work for Google)