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Comment by koz_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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