trilliumbaker

It could be argued that AMP was that attempt, and the only reason AMP gained tractions was Google started using it in the carousel of their SERPs.

While Safari, when mobile is included, has ~17% of the market, that's not enough when you combine Google's browser share along with their search engine share.

Google wields too much power. To an extent, they can dictate to website owners what HTML is allowed and not allowed thanks to their dominance in search. This is compounded by the fact that their browser marketshare via Chrome and now Microsoft Edge basically allows them to do what they want with HTML.

Matters are even worse. Last year, the W3C became the "yes-man" of Google. They decided to stop developing the HTML standards and just start rubber stamping whatever WHATWG produces. WHATWG is run by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. And who has the most power in that relationship? Yep, Google.

> I think we need age limits.

Ageism is not an acceptable solution. We complain about this in tech all the time. Why would we find it acceptable in politics?

> Google's Good Intention were to support privacy

I find this intent for be very difficult to believe. Chrome's privacy policy[0] already lists a ton of information that Chrome sends to Google.

I am cynical and simply do not trust Google. I see this as a move for control rather than privacy.

0. https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/

JavaScript has it covered pretty well.

http://www.jsfuck.com/

I worked as a language teacher for a while. You see products like Duolingo come along all the time. They're always accompanied by hype in how they will help you become fluent. It's simply not the case.

The products are not necessarily useless, but they only help some people make some progress some of the time. They never live up to the hype around them.

Language acquisition is a multifaceted endeavor which takes time and effort. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying. (There are some outliers who can learn/acquire languages with great speed, but they're very rare.)

The cruft is getting worse as Google takes away control from managers and turns it over to AI. It's like how exact match no longer means exact match.

I manage campaigns for a local, independent contractor. The business runs ads with a meager budget, <$500 a month. At the same time, clicks average around $5. The conversion rate hovers around 15% for those within the service area. That's a cost per conversion of ~$30.

For those who are outside of the service area it's less than <1%. While it may only receive a handful of clicks from outside the area a month, it eats into the already minuscule budget for the long shot of a person who decides to look up the service while on vacation or visiting relatives. It's not efficient ad spend for a business like this.

A SaaS business is a different case, but this issue is persistent and getting worse.