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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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How do you demand for smaller sites? To whom do you plead? Why will they listen to you?

You demonstrate your intent by paying for content subscriptions rather than visiting sites entirely supported by online advertisements.

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.

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.

This is an attempt by Google to influence the bloated websites out there, rather than a browser feature intended to attract users. It's probably mildly helpful as a user to know if a site is slow (as opposed to it just being slow for you), but it's a big incentive for a website owner to speed up their site if this badge of shame appears it for a majority of users.

Except of course unless it's one of Google's sites...

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.

> 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.

Yes, but Gmail doesn't really have to compete in Google Search, does it? So, in their eyes, it's OK for Gmail to score low because it has its own link in basically every navigation toolbar/header Google owns. This won't improve the speed at which Gmail loads, whereas all non-Google websites will have to improve their speed.

It's not that Gmail has a dominant position and so doesn't need to care about its rating - Gmail is an app not a page and it's less important for apps to load quickly than pages. Apps tend to be long lived and so a slow startup time is tolerable, whereas one is constantly opening new pages.

That is to say, I don't think e.g. Trello would really care if their site was "slow to load" either.

This is an attempt by Google to force everyone into AMP and nothing else.

You might be surprised how fast web pages load when the browser you’re using blocks the tracking scripts, especially on a mobile device. Brave runs on iOS and Android; the iOS version with the Brave Rewards wallet is expected to be released imminently.

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/

I have never seen a site that loaded hundreds of megs of data. That seems a little exaggeratory.

You've been lucky and didn't encounter sites loading 1080p videos as "hero images". Or perhaps you haven't browsed a news site with ad blocker off?

> Or perhaps you haven't browsed a news site with ad blocker off?

Yeah, it's been years and years since I did much browsing with an ad blocker off.

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