I've been working on core web vitals for the better part of a year at a major news outlet. I have seriously mixed feelings. There's probably an hour-long talk about this in me but briefly:
- It's really nice and maybe unprecedented to have an alignment of business, user, eng, and seo goals. Google is using it's monopoly to change roadmap priorities across the industry. The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user.
- Google's guidance on how the scores work and when changes will be incorporated into rankings / carousel eligibility has been overall poor. The info is out there but changes constantly and comes from myriad sources.
- Similarly, the way these scores are measured are a bit of a secret sauce. It's impossible really to model user behavior / devices in a way that ensures you will hit your performance targets. Google provides a lot of tooling/instrumentation, but the measurements sometimes conflict with one another.
I could go on. I'm the mst senior FE guy at this company and it's really consumed most of my work hours since last June, but that's kinda par for the course in publishing. Google swings it's weight around and publishers react.
Core web vitals is a joke. Literally 4 days ago it started bitching to me about breadcrumbs telling me that data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated
Google ; New Breadcrumbs issue detected for site xxxxx
24 Jun 2021•Breadcrumbs
So I look into it, knowing I'd fixed that ages ago....
Google ; Last crawled : 13 Nov 2019
Triggering stuff because you eventually got round to looking at it 19 months later? and it's all like that full of massive holes that make zero sense.
Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"...
Me; "It has no reviews"
Google; "ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! zero is not a valid number!!!!"
Me; "Fuck you Google"
Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"...
I'm not even going to get into how shitty pagespeed insights is* - it's not even close to lighthouse. It tells you to increase your caching but doesn't use caching in performance measurements. I presume google has a giant ass that it pulls most of the figures out of on each run. I live in an area of the UK with one of the worst mobile phone signals known to man, pages load in < 2 seconds google consistently claims at least double.
I really don't enjoy spending hours of my days having to check that Google haven't moved the goalposts yet again.
I tried to report a bug to Intuit about QuickBooks online the other day. 45 minutes later, the person answering the phone at the other end was finally able to give me a ticket number. I don't understand why it has become so hard to give feedback to developers to improve their product. I like it when people report bugs that give me a better understanding of how my software is being used -- am I really in the minority here?
If you want to write something about your experience with this, I'm sure the community here would appreciate a fact-based third-party article. If you wrote it in the same style as your comment here, we would put such an article in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it would get a random placement on HN's front page. Email me at hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like some tips about that.
* The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user*
Fast pages are good, but Google is using their tools like Page Speed to push you to adopt Google’s ideas of fast, like using WebP for images. So now you might have a bunch of cruft in your page to support multiple image types.
Also, as user, I hate lazy loading. I can scroll faster than images load. I’d rather everything load in the beginning, and have images there as I scroll.
WebP is good iff it improves rendering times (which it does). That's not google's fault really. Any way you can come up with to optimize images is valid under Core Web Vitals. I really don't think any of it is skewed towards Google's solutions except the testing/measurement methodology. I would love open source data collection across browsers for instance.
Lazy-loading can be implemented sloppily, but browser-native lazy loading is now good enough to be considered optimal.
browser-native lazy loading is now good enough to be considered optimal
The problem is that Google Page Speed dings you for not having lazy loading, and people add crappy JavaScript lazy loading that satisfies Google, but makes the user experience worse.
WebP is good iff it improves rendering times (which it does). That's not google's fault really.
The problem has been, until recently, Safari didn't support WebP, so you had to implement a fallback to jpg. More complicated HTML, more images to compress and manage, all for a very marginal improvement.
Most sites would use the user agent for this but I’m pretty sure HTML now has a picture tag which can have multiple sources so the browser can pick the source it wants.
So disable native lazy loading in your about:config then?
On sites that employ legacy JS-based techniques, disabling JS might help (sounds like you are talking about article-like content).
I assume that those sites will vanish quickly though.
"Lazy loading" interactive content is an entirely different thing.
Shopping pages with tons of product images, Infinite scroll (yuck) are different...
You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it.
That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals.
A site I built a while ago is a good test case for that imho, https://www.sustaphones.com/. Long list, many small images, loaded from a CDN. I can maybe provoke a flicker with the scrollbar, but not with regular scrolling.
Edit: That's for broadband. With a 56K modem or something that's of course a different story. But loading a bunch of images in advance on the modern web is also not a good option then.
What absolute nonsense. It doesn't matter which "async image standard" you use, you're fundamentally limited by my internet connection. I agree completely with GP, I would rather open a page in the background, give it some time to load all of the images and then browse it. Lazy loading is a pain.
Your test case is totally meaningless, the images are under 3kb. Full (non-lazy) image loading is far more important on websites with lots of large images.
If you implement lazy image loading yourself in JS you will see that the implementation actually makes a big difference in how noticeable it is. The browser does a good job with it. Of course your internet connection can limit you, but it just won't do so on regular broadband connections for sound image sizes.
You can always construct a theoretical case where it does not work great. But on those pages and connections loading all the images in advance will usually also lead to a bad experience.
On slower networks, it's common to load a page, do something else until the page is 100% done, and then expect to be able to view the whole page without any further loading.
I'm aware :) My HP Veer had a funny "feature" where after some inactivity it would reload the page when you then scrolled it.
It depends though on the content page and on how slow the network is exactly, doesn't it? I often enough preferred to have the text already and decide based on that whether to wait for the images. Async with non-jumping base content (which the core web vitals also cover) is great for that.
And with it being a browser feature, even if Google pushes for it the user can always deactivate it. On real browsers at least.
JS lazy loading is a thing of the past.
Just because some sites are slow to adopt, that doesn't make it a valid argument against lazy loading per se.
Native lazy loading is broadly supported, it works well, has no overhead, and you can override the behaviour if you always want eager loading.
There's no point in complaining about it that I am able to grasp.
I don't have data on this but I assume that JS lazy loading is dying rapidly because this is not a critical feature that must polyfilled for legacy browsers.
Of course, plenty of sites will keep their JS lazy loading cruft until the next code refactoring / optimization.
But I am very happy that native lazy loading has been standardized and implemented.
That goes against that specific implementation then, not against the concept, and not against how the feature should be implemented now.
I was critical at first as well. But I tested it on the site I linked and on other sites with bigger images, and it just worked that well that I stand to what I said. This feature is a net-positive and in most scenarios the loading will either not be noticeable, or it will be an advantage overall.
On Friday I completed the install of a new fibre connection for a customer. They had been stuck on a flaky 1.8Mbps ADSL service for years, and the incumbent wanted $30,000 to go 5 poles down the road to their hours. Yes, in 2021 there are still people who can scroll faster than images load.
Granted. Like I specified, I talked about broadband there.
He preferred to wait all the time until images are loaded to start reading articles, with a flaky slow connection, or to try start reading while parts of the site still load? Especially on a slow connection not having to load the images immediately, or at all if the visitor does not scroll down as much, can make browsing so much better.
Your definition of broadband is wrong. Even 1.8 Mbps counts as broadband. Please be more precise in the terms that you use.
The main problem the customer I was referring to had is that the user interfaces for these websites would not function until they finished loading after 30 to 90 seconds, despite the fact that the user interfaces rarely changed. These were for cloud based accounting and scheduling platforms the business was required to use.
Developers really should have to try to use the systems they build on systems that have low bandwidth / high latency network connections rather than the typical fibre fed office environment. If you can build a website that works well for that use case, it's probably going to be incredibly snappy on a fast connection. Judging by how bloated the web is these days, that is rarely the case in today's world.
What usually happens there is that the sites do not work because the JS wasn't downloaded and interpreted yet. That happens more often when all the images are always downloaded when loading the page. Lazy loading of images is one method to address exactly this problem :)
My definition of broadband is correct, and 1.8Mbps does not match it. Where I live 1.8Mbps just is not legal broadband. In the US that also does not count as broadband anymore, see https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/, and it hasn't for over a decade.
It's partly JS, it's partly the data populating the tables.
I must say that the FCC really messed up by redefining broadband when they were the ones that had originally defined it in terms of RF spectrum usage. Here in Canada, the telecom regulatory body set the Basic Service Objective to be 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. They didn't try to redefine what broadband is and overload a term that already had meaning in the telecommunications space.
Personally I think latency is more important with modern internet connections. 10 Mbps is still quite usable for a lot of things, but not if it's 500ms RTT via a satellite. Sadly most telecom regulators ignore latency.
The typical WordPress lazy loading script doesn't start loading the image until it is scrolling into view. Try a typical food blog, scroll moderately slowly and you'll still get to see every single image load.
edit: your example works great, but is in outlier in the implementation, and benefits from tiny images that load quickly.
Since I'm just in this thread again anyway: If that was your experience with lazy loading images I can relate, and understand where the negative impression is coming from. That wordpress script is probably loading the image only when the DOM object becomes visible, which will always cause the loading process to be noticeable. Shortly on good connections with small images, so it won't matter much there, but that experience gets worse for slower connections and bigger images of course.
My background that made me write the comment above is that I implemented lazy loading for a feedreader in JS, with predictive early loading to exactly avoid this problem, and I did test the browser feature just recently again. In those scenarios lazy loading really does work well enough for my statement to be true, according to my testing. For common connection speeds and image sizes only of course. Though I'd argue it also helps in less optimal scenarios exactly because it somewhat decouples the image loading from the page load - that that overall experience was horrible on long threads with many images in the feedreader was why the lazy loading feature was added, the contrast was stark.
I should have defined that better in the comment above and given your experience more validity. Next time :)
It "passes" the google lazy load audit, but is a terrible user experience. Doing no image load optimization would be much better than what they are doing presumably to please google.
That's definitely too defensive and that makes it a bit annoying. I'm sure the page would work very well with the html lazy loading, the images are small enough.
Getting wildly different numbers from different tools is super annoying but I'm pretty sure the data they'll actually use in rankings is crowdsourced from Chrome users: https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/
Which of course you can only see weeks in retrospect.
Yeah not only is there a 28 day lag time, but _new_ content on your site is grouped with "similar" URLs, using some secret Google special sauce to determine other pages on your site to use as a baseline. This has been one of the most frustrating parts.
Or to take it further, it's still nearly impossible to use google's tools and determine that a particular DIV or Ad is causing damaging shift _in aggregate_.
Worse, it's impossible (and probably will always be) to tell the dollar value of getting all the web vitals to "green". They are pretty agressive targets for most publishers I think, but it's unclear exactly how much these fixes are worth (in additional traffic, seo performance, carousel inclusion, etc).
This is a bit "the nature of the beast" when dealing with Google rankings, their most valuable corporate secret, but still, this is a big, hard, expensive job, with relatively clear inputs and measurement, but with totally opaque outputs / ROI.
I vehemently disagree that "Core Web Vitals" would be worse. I'm as wary of Google as the author, but Google's page performance tools have a reasonably good history of staying in their lane of just measuring performance.
Having "page performance" as a non-trivial weighted factor in how pages are ranked just makes sense to me.
Even if CWV is somewhat flawed, I'd much rather optimize for that than give control of my pages to Google ala AMP.
The replacement they're whining about is "core web vitals" IE the metric you can view at[1]. This is what AMP should have been in the beginning and I was surprised they did something else, it made Google search unusable on mobile.
There is one metric where hand-coded-in-vim pages tend to do poorly, and that's cumulative layout shift. If you have images on your page (a reasonable assumption) and just stick <img> tags in there, you can get dinged on cumulative layout shift because the layout will shift as images get loaded.
I use a somewhat hand-coded-in-vim approach, but there's some post-processing that adds width/height attributes to <img> tags which mitigates this particular problem.
Edit: Not sure why everyone is telling me to add "height" and "width" attributes, because that's what I wrote in the comment, above. Just to explain how this works--the width and height attributes describe the "intrinsic size" of the image.
Tip: Add "height" and "width" attributes even if the rendered size will be different because of CSS.
The CSS sizing will still take precedence but the height/width attributes let the browser know the aspect ratio without having to download the image so it can layout the page faster.
Having two CSS rules in a single selector is something you absolutely can do in vim. You can even chuck it in a one line style tag. IMO cumulative layout shift should be ranked down, it's extremely frustrating.
I think it's one of the more elegant styling things in HTML, you don't need to use the more verbose style=, it's just plain Jane height= and width=. I've never left it out, and I've written a few HTML pages by hand.
They are used to determine the intrinsic size. The aspect ratio is also affected by the CSS rules, and doesn't necessarily equal the aspect ratio of the intrinsic size.
It's surprisingly hard to set up good images in a hand-coded-in-vim website. You're supposed to include multiple image sizes and set up the code for loading each in HTML. So what could have been simply adding an <img> tag now turns into a chore involving ImageMagick.
That’s an extreme claim that requires some backing evidence. Mobile search quality is the main metric google uses to judge its search products. The idea that google search is “unusable on mobile” is pretty silly, if you’re literally the only person who ever noticed.
I also don't understand why more people aren't making a firestorm over how user-hostile Google search is at times. They don't even follow their own rules. The "People also searched for" popup causes layout shifts nearly every time you go back to the search page. It's infuriating.
I know this is only orthogonal to AMP, but it sounds like the kind of thing Core Web Vitals was meant to disincentivize.
You probably did what I did and mostly missed what was happening the past couple years by using duckduckgo the whole time. I formatted my phone at some point last year and the search engine reverted to google, it really was unusable but not something people who wouldn't know better would get too upset about.
Look, you're right that this is essentially Google making everyone eat their vegetables but isn't it a little wild that this single company has so much control over the internet that they can basically make sweeping decrees like this?
No, I don't think so. There are hundreds if not thousands of unique domains for nearly every single query. Very few of those are providing first-hand, unique information. Take Apple product announcements; there are hundreds of high-traffic blogs basically creating identical content rehashing a press release or writing posts about newly announced products.
There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over others. Same goes for sports, celebrity/gossip, news, etc. That would be most of the open web right there.
Google also moved to mobile-first indexing some years ago. Was that unfair to mom-and-pop shops that didn't have a responsively designed site? Perhaps, but if the website is something that brings you business, it's a tool that should be sharpened when dull, and replaced when its rusty.
You're absolutely right that UX should have precedence for equal info. There's a reason why I like going to the slickly-made Verge instead of every other site for routine news like what was announced at a particular company's event. That, and I like their short summary videos.
I like their summary videos as well. Unfortunately I'm less of a fan of the website. The design is messy; they're trying to do the "website as magazine" style, but they're dependent on Google Ads so the experience feels disjointed.
I can see that. It's still a far cry from a website with interstitials and auto-playing video, but perhaps I'm setting the bar too low by comparing to like CNN.
You will need to use millionshort.com or a similar niche-based search engine for that. Otherwise, it is the equivalent of asking Apple to let you filter out apps that use Facebook SDK; completely futile.
The overwhelming majority of websites being created today include some kind of tracker, even if it's a single analytics script. And knowing the HN audience, that's still one tracker too many.
Yes, it is, especially if a user doesn't want to be tracked. Flag the website as malicious and the problem would go away quickly. It doesn't serve any purpose anyway. Companies as advertising consumers just want to be on equal footing.
I think that's a fair point. I'd love to see more of this done in coalition. Google doing solo not only can bend the web toward Google's corporate interests, but it undermines the growth of other social structures (e.g., citizen movements, nonprofit advocacy groups, regulators, governments) to solve problems like this.
3s load time is crazy high. You need to get below 0.1 second before it feels instant, which would be a huge upgrade compared to most websites (it should still feel instant if you load the ads after that, just so long that you don't change the layout on the page at all).
I have a gigabit connection, so it is not a question about not downloading fast enough, I can browse wikipedia this way. It is a matter of not using so much javascript.
AMP was great for those with very low speed internet. The philosophy and implementation of AMP can be questioned (URL masking, content stored away from the origin) but it did show that users really wanted to click on pages that loaded fast.
Core Web Vitals, as a publisher myself, are a nightmare. But at least we know what goes wrong as it's clearly laid right in front of the developer's eyes. So we go and fix thing after thing. And some pages just won't get fixed because of some ads.
The point is CWV do make the web better. Those vital metrics are actually making sense (CLS, LCP).
I understand the reticence and reserve at who is behind both these efforts that AMP and CWV are, but they forced me to make my websites faster, cleaner.
Was it a panicky few months trying to get this sorted? Yes. Did we have to speak to ad networks so they fix up some ad delivery? Yes. Will Google really rank us better thanks to that? Maybe. Couldn't we have done it from our own accord? The incentive wasn't big enough I guess.
But today, the fact is, the experience on all of our websites is very much clearly improved.
Turning of javascript completely breaks so many sites, but it is much, much, much faster to browse the web that way. I run Ublock Origin and it is great, but you are often still paying the javascript price.
> And some pages just won't get fixed because of some ads.
This makes me wonder if the choice between leaving in ads that lower page rank due to CWV and removing some ads to get a better page rank will lead to less advertising overall. I can only hope, I guess.
I definitely removed ads on some pages, but because they were monetized differently. I think even small publishers are going to be more aware and granular at the page-level.
You're right but publishers know their bounce rates so for some, people rarely navigate after landing on their pages. For others, it's almost always the case.
Well, my click-through rates on mobile for many of the same pages without AMP have dropped for the same position. Yes, after fixing CWV I removed AMP as keeping two layouts optimised was draining as a small publisher.
> The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers.
Web developers don't suck at making fast websites. Publishers demand tons of ads and tracking scripts. If the person signing the paychecks wants the page to have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS, then the page will have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS. AMP succeeded because Google brandished a stick that publishers cared about more: exclusion from the Top News carousel.
I'd also note that the whole reason this ad tech explosion even happened is a race to the bottom that Google itself facilitated. Google is selling us solutions to a problem that Google had a huge hand in causing.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager need to take the blame here. Web developers are doing their damnedest to build a decent site or application, until marketing/growth steps in and makes GTM a requirement, and product want to try out the 6 different analytics tools they're looking at.
You can at least push back on the product somewhat, or use something like Segment to fan-out. But once Marketing gets GTM in place, all bets are off - they're doing god knows what to the site/application, completely outside of the purview of the usual engineering process, because they can inject whatever they hell they want into the page.
GTM is essentially a backdoor but it gets a pass because marketing.
Web devs emphatically, and by definition, do not suck at developing websites.
> If the person signing the paychecks wants the page to have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS, then the page will have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS.
I was asked by management to add Google Tag Manager to the company site. When I saw that GTM included 15-20 tracking scripts I told them that unfortunately we can't include it until we have ensured that all of them act in accordance with GDPR. Legal was involved and agreed. Marketing gave up.
You're technically correct, but people who write pay checks often can be argued with. They often don't want to be on record taking decisions which can cause issues, and legal typically don't want to sign of on including 15MB unknown scripts on your site accepting credit cards.
> You're technically correct, but people who write pay checks often can be argued with.
That's true, but the proliferation of ad tech junk is strong evidence that this is the exception rather than the rule. Capital will persuade labor to do its bidding far more often than not.
What's the solution?
If anything, the proliferation of ad tech junk and 15MB of various ad-related things is probably better than just that 1MB of only Google Ads scripts, no?
Or are we going to talk about how online advertising has been the economic backbone of the web? Not that I'm advocating for it, by hiding the true cost of things, publishers have brought this onto themselves really.
So no more ads? That's probably going to kill a lot of sites, whether they are contributing anything to mankind or not.
Yeah sure let's bury our head in the sand and pretend all forms of media will thrive while only selling subscriptions but so far, we've seen how it went for the older ones (newspaper, radio, tv ...)
Or we can acknowledge that advertisment is there to stay and we instead develop a proper framework to make it work sanely rather than all the duct-taping we've done so far.
The real failure is the unwillingness to confront the fact that ads were there to stay and should have been baked into a W3C standard ages ago instead but here we are.
Surveillance capitalism isn't the same as advertising. But I think your point is undercut by the fact that most of the industries you mentioned are doing… fine? TV is thriving selling ads (broadcast/cable) and also subscriptions (Netflix/etc). Radio is thriving selling ads (terrestrial) and also subscriptions (Spotify/etc). Even newspapers are figuring this thing out; NYT added a record number of subscribers last year.
Do you have strong evidence that developers think about these things and bring it up with legal? I'd not, then the only strong evidence is that developers are sloppy.
None? I have no clues what marketings goal are and frankly I don't care. If they want to insert some junk.js into their web page they need at least to ensure it is legal.
Not really, no. There are 500 people in marketing organization and I doubt there are less than 20 conflicting end goals within that organization. Unless you're going all fluffy and talk about company goal as said by the owners.
Either way, if their process of reaching their end goal included steps which legal dismissed then they needed to go back to the drawing board and figure out a new strategy, right? It would be strange for me who doesn't work in their profession come and tell them how to solve their issues.
You just have to browse the AMP pages on Google Assistant to see how easily they can be devolved into slow dumpster fires despite the rules to maintain speed.
It's not just Google, it doesn't matter if the company in change is all sunshine and rainbows today, who knows what they will do tomorrow (looking at you freenode). Centralized level of control like this is anathama to the whole future of the web.
I feel like you picked a bad example because while Freenode is a centralized service the community immediately routed around the crazy in the span of like two weeks. Centralization isn't really that big of a problem in practice, it's lock-in.
I find "Web Core Vital" to be fairly useless (outside of trying appease Google.) I can make a page load slower and feel worse for anyone visiting the site...and the "Core Vitals" score will increase. So, how is this about the user experience? You can inline all of your CSS to increase your score, but what about users that visit more than one page? Now they have larger payloads per page. Then at that point what is the point of rewarding all inlining, but then throwing a fit about not using a CDN with a long caching parameter? It's not consistent.
Why not just use overall page size and ttfb instead of this nonsensical metric that isn't a great measurement, in my experience, of website performance/user experience; outside of keeping everyone guessing what Google might do next, what's the point? I also find it extremely ironic that many of Google's own products are complete failures on the metric.
I've even found that you can trick the metric by essentially loading a blank page where a browser will feel the page is fully loaded, then having a delay that loads the page.
Here's a better criticism: the Core Vitals metrics that affect SEO rank on Google are sourced only from Chrome browsers.
So an even more disproportionate amount of site performance work will now be focused just on what makes Chrome happy. Experimental Chrome features that boost performance metrics will be embraced in the name of SEO. Safari and Firefox can't offer that.
It's another way Google uses their control of the search market to cement their browser as the de facto standard.
I guess the difference comes, when law requirement happens on EU only, not globally. So the question is, which is worse; not regulate at all or regulated only in one area. It bars access from some point of view, it might not exist if you don't see it from search results.
There's no question. What you're suggesting is "I shot one leg, might as well shoot the other". There's no reason why it would be better if everyone suffers the same fate rather than about half a billion people having it better. Having to provide a better service for so many users just puts pressure on a company by showing every other user not benefiting yet that it's possible, that they can ask and expect more.
If you serve something in another country, you abide by their rules. Be it a physical product or a virtual one, which includes a website or webservice.
True, and we could already see this with the great firewall of China and the intranet of North Korea. And today, there's many American sites which serve me a 451 unavailable due to legal reasons, or just a permanent redirect to some "we care about our European visitors" weasel words.
It’s really not. The concept of “your house, your rules” can be found in ancient Roman texts. Being a foreigner didn’t suddenly exempt you from the laws of the land.
You're not in their "house". You're just communicating with someone who is. If some foreign government has a problem with that communication they should take it up with the party who is physically within their jurisdiction—not that I believe they have any just standing there either.
You’re trying to do business in another country with different rules. If you want to sell food into the EU, you need to comply with their food safety regulations.
Why does this magically change when someone utters the words “the internet?”
> You’re trying to do business in another country with different rules.
You are not doing business in another country. First, there may not be any "business" involved at all. More importantly, however, you are not in the other country. The other person is. If physical property is involved then someone—not necessarily you—is going to need to worry about import/export regulations when moving it across the border. When it comes to virtual services and websites, however, those concerns rooted in physical transportation do not apply.
> Why does this magically change when someone utters the words “the internet?”
It makes no difference whether you're communicating over the Internet or by phone or two-way radio or postal mail or carrier pigeon, or by shouting to each other across the border. So long as you're only exchanging data and not physical goods they can implement technical measures to block the communication at the border, or order their own residents not to communicate with you—in which case I would advise them to make arrangements leave the country posthaste—but you yourself remain outside their jurisdiction.
This is not about “data” moving over borders. This is about services being provided from one country to another. This is something governments already regulate within their borders (and have for centuries).
This is something that’s already heavily regulated for other industries e.g. financial services. There’s nothing novel about the GDPR in that aspect.
No service involves “nothing but data.” This has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it’s governing the rules of business transactions between two entities across borders. Stop throwing out spurious terms to try and cloud the debate.
Neither of those are just data. One provides information about topics of interest that you can edit, one provides a forum through you can interact with other people.
Your model is nonsense - physical goods are not the same as digital goods.
Regardless of whether or not your model actually makes sense, an inevitable consequence of your model is that the internet will become siloed at a national level. It sounds like you’re fine with that though.
Show me a company that ever got sued, indicted, or fined by a foreign country for sending internet packets to that country, with no other business presence in the country, before 2010.
I don't care if it's "unusual" or not - I'm just pointing out that the legal model you're espousing will inevitably result in a siloed internet. Don't shoot the messenger.
I’m not espousing a legal model at all. I’m just pointing out that literally no government in history has ever said “you can send whatever you want into our country with no restrictions.”
You’re confusing the Internet with services that use the Internet to do business. The former is just a delivery mechanism for the latter, which is what’s being regulated.
Plenty of countries require you to register for sales tax once you establish a presence in their country, whether you sell goods or services. No business operating in this environment thinks it’s unreasonable to do so. Once again “their house, their rules.”
Laws don’t give a damn about data packets: they’re interested in the real world outcomes which are the services those packets enable. If you can’t understand this then I’m not wasting any more time explaining the basics of real life to you.
Unusual, no. Unjust, yes, and impractical besides. If (unlike me) you accept the legal fiction that a country's government "owns" everything within its self-proclaimed official borders, with all the corresponding rights of a property owner within that domain, then they can either block the communication at the border or impose requirements on those living within, provided that anyone who doesn't care to agree to those rules is free to leave without further penalty. In any case, their jurisdiction does not extend to any party (or parties) to the communication outside their physical borders.
It’s unjust for a government to regulate what enters its borders from another country? So you’re suggesting that the U.K. should allow assault rifles to be sold from the USA, in spite of the fact they’re outright illegal to own inside the borders of the U.K.
Why is it unjust when literally the entire U.K. population is in support of this position?
> Why is it unjust when literally the entire U.K. population is in support of this position?
Obviously not "literally the entire U.K. population" if someone in the U.K. isn't following the rule.
This is a complex subject and I'm not going to get into it here, but the Cliff's Notes version is basically that the U.K. government is not a party to this transaction, is not harmed by it, and does not represent (as in: having a formal, revocable agent/principal relationship with) anyone who is either a party to the transaction or harmed by it, and thus has no standing to interfere. The justice or injustice of the matter is unaffected by whether the government's interference would be popular.
Put simply: your logic is insane and no government adopts it, for good reason.
Longer version: governments adopt rules based on what works for them and their population. This includes rules that govern what can and can’t be sold in a business transaction. This is a principle as old as government itself. It makes sense that governments then apply these rules to things going in and out of its borders. It would be nuts to ban the sale of guns inside a country but allow them to be sold into the country, for example.
> This includes rules that govern what can and can’t be sold in a business transaction. This is a principle as old as government itself.
If we're talking about a "business transaction" as in an exchange of physical goods across the border, then I agree. I said that it was unjust, not that it was without precedent. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I believe in the concept of government itself. The core of what government is, and does, is unjust. Arguing that governments have always done things this way carries zero weight with me.
Applying these rules (or any rules) to the non-commercial exchange of information, or even to commercial services involving no exchange of physical property, is the recent, and more immediately concerning, development.
> It would be nuts to ban the sale of guns inside a country…
I agree with you up to that point. But if they want to ban the import of "wireless handheld hold punchers" or any other contraband they should do that at the border, by stopping the shipments—which at that point consist of the buyer inside the country attempting to import their own property after the sale—and not by attempting to impose their internal rules on foreign sellers. Residents could buy them but would have to keep them outside the country, perhaps using them only while visiting the country the goods were in at the time of the sale, or somewhere else where they are legal.
This is not, strictly speaking, an obvious forgone conclusion.
Imagine that I call you over the phone, old school style, with voice. Would you or would you not want the governments on either end of the phone line to eavesdrop on our conversation so they can make sure it meets their local laws? What if we communicated by SMS? Email? Posting on a message board?
Some people will have an "obviously yes, I want the government to be in charge, are you dumb?" reaction. Others will say "of course I want privacy, are you dumb?"
Early Internet chose privacy. Modern internet is increasingly choosing regulation. But this is far from the obvious truth you are claiming it is, if only because the prevailing opinion changed in recent memory.
Actually I'd quite like it if my government could block foreign phone calls that attempt to spoof local numbers.
If only as a way of stopping foreign criminal gangs from scamming the vulnerable.
The main reason this can't happen is because of international agreements that were made long before the internet age or this type of crime became a thing.
And there are others who, when faced with the trade-off, would choose differently.
It's amusing how on another thread the general consensus may be a celebration of Let's Encrypt while over here I seem to come off as crazy (and thus deserving of downvotes simply for saying "not everyone agrees with you").
You are probably receiving downvotes because you're making a non sequitur. The web is, unlike phonelines, encrypted. At best it's a strawman or just a false equivalence.
Interesting! I see communication as communication, and the medium as completely separate. Does it really matter that much if I communicate an idea to another mind using squiggles on paper, dots on a screen, or recordings of sound waves?
I think I disagree with the premise of your argument that we're choosing between one of "pervasive wiretapping level invasiveness" or "internet companies cant be regulated"
Do you want the government to bug you and watch every interaction you have in your local store to find out if the store is breaking the law? But then how does the government know if the store is just not paying their taxes, or selling drugs?
Laws can be enforced without resorting to wiretapping everyone by just not accepting you can't catch every single violation; that true both online and offline.
I agree, some laws are dumb and stupid, some inhumane, some simply impractical, and we should be above them. Sadly we aren't because we don't have an army and populace. If only I was in charge I would... But the sad reality is that I'm not.
If you choose to conflate “sending packets to the EU” with “operating in the EU”, you are choosing a future where the internet is siloed off and the web ceases to be a global network. I am not passing judgment - merely stating a fact.
The restrictions don't need to directly restrict how packets get sent - if they impose tax/regulatory costs for packets getting routed a certain way, the end result will be the same.
This is a bit like complaining about restrictions on "sending atoms to the EU" when they decide to impose tariffs or safety regulations on consumer goods. Businesses shouldn't get to flout regulations just because they happen to be digital.
Cool opinion. I’m not disagreeing with it. I don’t care. I’m just explaining that a logical entailment of your opinion is that the internet will be siloed off. Stop trying to convince me that your opinion is right. It’s totally irrelevant whether or not it’s right.
It's not the laws that have destroyed the experience, it's the reckless and senseless selling of data. Websites don't need to show any popups, they choose to.
Honouring DNT should be trivial, no user interaction needed to stop tracking and therefore the need for 99% of these popups.
If you think about the GDPR, it's not about cookies at all but consent for tracking.
Many websites prefer to destroy their usability to get your consent in various deceptive ways. You can definitely have technical cookies and no cookies banner.
How do you propose they source that data from other browsers? Do you e.g. think Apple and Mozilla would provide them with a suitable feed, at a high enough granularity to be useful?
And if they did, what do you think the public reaction would be to such data sharing?
That's phrasing the problem in a format where the only solution is Google. Re-phrasing it as "What else can a search engine do to stop being gamed?" opens up a lot more options.
The real problem here is not 'gamed search engines' but too much centralisation, with Google owning the search engine, the browser, and the ad platform. This solution makes that problem worse, not better.
Sorry, no. You're moving the goalposts. The criticism from eli was not e.g. that using page speed as a ranking criteria is intrinsically bad. It was that the data was sourced only from Chrome (including the italics).
It's like I've fallen into a crazy parallel dimension. For more than *five years* HN commenters have been ranting about how AMP is not needed, and all that's needed is using page speed as the signal. And now when that happens, it's suddenly an outrage.
HN isn't a monolith and someone will always find something to complain about. (I'm happy to be the someone here.)
Google has such a dominant position in both search and browsers that, yeah, they're going to need to work extra hard to make sure one doesn't unfairly advantage the other.
It’s true of any contentious content. The commenters who engage are usually the ones who want to push back against the main article (otherwise you just get a highly upvoted post with minimal comments because it’s hard to come up with a value-adding way to say “yes, this”). But you end up getting different people commenting on both sides, with neither half as invested when the source agrees with them. Grouping them together as a cohesive “HN” obscures that division, and makes it seem like the position suddenly reverses.
I remember that. Every other post on HN used to be how bad AMP is for the future of human civilization and how Google should have used page performance in their ranking instead. Well, Google did just that and now eli et al. moved the goal post.
The morale of the story is it's impossible to make everyone happy.
I'm not an ambassador of HN opinion and I didn't set the first goalpost.
But there's no contradiction in asking for a neutral way to include performance in the rankings and then being disappointed when the solution considers only performance of Google's own browser.
If someone goes from regularly punching me in the arm to kicking me in the shins, I'm not going to say "gee thanks for not punching me in the arm any more".
Shifting from one technology to another is not a solution when all the options vacuum and hoard data to further entrench Google's position. A real choice would be Google splitting the different parts of their business model they are leveraging to lock out competitors, but since that's not good for their shareholders, I don't expect to see it any time soon.
The entire premise of the speed metrics influencing search results is to make sure Google search is a fast experience. A decade ago, it seemed at first that the point was a benevolent attempt to make the web a better place using their influence, but I can't accept that anymore.
> How do you propose they source that data from other browsers?
Easy. Google should not be operating the monopoly search engine _and_ the monopoly web browser. They need to spin off search or Chrome as a separate company. Then they can source their data from wherever they like. Then every browser is an "other browser".
Ok. So the first problem is that people would end up optimizing for entirely the wrong thing. Rather than optimize for the machines and networks that are actually in use, you'd optimize for high CPU Linux servers with no GPU connected over high bandwidth and low latency networking. Not low CPU mobile phones over LTE or dodgy WiFi.
Second, you wouldn't complain that it's an unfair advantage to pages in the Google AMP cache, due to a better network location? An unfair advantage to pages hosted on GCP? An unfair disadvantage to iOS due to there being no iOS server hardware that could be used for testing?
Then don’t go with the stupidest most naive way of benchmarking, and actually try to replicate some real-world scenarios? This would be utterly trivial for Google.
Synthetic benchmarking with actual end-user network conditions, or actual end-user browser+hardware combinations is in my opinion functionally impossible. (And you've excluded real world telemetry as an option). Just how do would you fairly benchmark Safari on iPhone performance on billions of web pages?
If it's truly not possible to measure these performance metrics in a way that takes non-Google browsers into account then they are bad metrics and I'd prefer something else.
I don't think that I'm obligated to solve a problem just because I observed it.
But yes, I think it's plausible that other browser makers could allow users to opt in to this sort of data reporting. It would lead to a more equitable web.
I'm also not totally convinced that page performance should play a significant role in rankings in the first place.
Fast pages are good for the web generally, but Google treats the entire internet like pages of search results and this can punish some people who aren’t building search results. There are lots and lots of good experiences on the web that are optimized for multiple page views because they’re communities, educational, or some other kind of application - they’re designed for people who stick around.
I worry that if core vitals becomes too strong of a signal it will over homogenize things to the point that we’re further ostracizing parts of the web that aren’t built like fast results pages to get an answer and bounce off of. We need more differing alternatives to Google.
I hate this idea that the technology needs to be dictated by Google. If it's displayable in a web browser, that's all that should matter to a good search engine.
Just change the algorithm to reward fast websites even more.
If page speed currently counts for say 5% of a site's value in the algorithm, bump it up to 10%, 15%, 25% etc, whatever it takes until sites that pump in piles of garbage JS trackers and monstrosities start removing that stuff.
Sites that insist on leaving in garbage trackers and bloated designs will not show up as much. Problem solved without dictating technology.
In case you're trying to find what the replacement is:
> Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it.
So the problem isn't core web vitals nor AMP itself, but the fact that everyone uses Google and they control the results on google.com.
We can now go back to our regularly scheduled discussion about how this is bad.
The article is also surprised that people are still using AMP now that it's no longer required, because in the author's mind, AMP is so god dang awful that when given the chance, everyone would immediately want to get rid of it.
Some people are so deeply lost in their hatred of AMP that they cannot even consider for a moment that maybe, just maybe, AMP actually does work well for some people.
I'm glad it's no longer required, and if people are correct that AMP truly sucks, then surely it'll slowly fade away over time.
My opinion is regularly "unpopular" here on HN, but I happen to love AMP. Sometimes constraints can be a blessing. Don't want to over engineer? Use AMP.
Of course you can over engineer anything, but why would you when [almost] everything you need is easy to grab a la carte.
To me, nobody would willingly give up the most important part of their page's real estate (the top X pixels) and the branding value of what it says in the url bar...unless there was a tradeoff that made it worth it. As far as I can tell, carousel placement was that tradeoff. Until recently, you weren't allowed in unless you were on AMP.
Also, I'm not sure this is well known, but if you navigate to a web page from the carousel, Google traps the left and right swipe events on YOUR page. Either sends to user to a competitor. That's a pretty big compromise you would only make because the traffic boost from the carousel was worth it.
There's nothing about AMP that requires anyone to give up any part of their page. The presentation you are talking about is a feature of only certain AMP hosting services. A lot of organizations host their own AMP sites, like Conde Nast magazines. Example:
"AMP helps us satisfy these needs. AMP increases the visibility and discoverability of our content by allowing it to be included in Google’s Top News Carousel, as well as improving the experience of regular Google search results"
So, from Chrome mobile, I searched for "springsteen anti-vaccine". The first carousel entry is a CondeNast property, vanityfair.com, with an AMP lightning bolt icon.
The top bar is Google controlled. The url in the omnibar is a google url. So I'm not seeing how Conde Nast is a good example here. Before they very recently rescinded the requirement, using a non-Google AMP cache meant you didn't get into the carousel.
What you're complaining about is that Google frames the carousel results, which is a completely legitimate complaint, but which is not really related to AMP as such.
Edited to add: An example of where the same content is not framed by the same search engine is on Chrome Mobile's new tab page "articles for you". Many of these are directly links to unframed AMP content, such as what I'm seeing right now: seekingalpha.com/amp/..., thehill.com/...?amp etc
My point is that I believe Conde Nast chose AMP mostly so they would be in the carousel and not lose traffic since the carousel pushes down the organic results. The quotes from them I copied in up-thread comments seem to align with that. I also believe they would have passed on AMP if the carousel wasn't there, but I obviously can't prove that.
As a web developer, I really value the extra speed that having my page served from an AMP cache + predictive prefetching gives me. And now that signed exchanges have shipped, giving up the top X pixels and the URL bar are no longer required trade-offs to get that value.
That's a good point. Webkit's opposition to Signed Exchanges (ironically, canonically expressed in an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679621) means that I'm stuck with AMP for good performance on iOS for the foreseeable future.
Sure, I've read Mozilla's standard-position document and I understand their objections, I'm just saying that Webkit's objection is the major blocker to me personally adopting sxg (since Firefox is basically 0% of my mobile traffic)
I'm not a web developer but as a user I love AMP. For whatever issues it has it did significantly help mobile performance. Could developers have solved that issue with AMP? Yes Did developers solve the issue prior to AMP forcing them to? No.
How is having to use “amp” attributes and loading a script from ampproject dot org simpler than just not doing that and everything works with every browser and without JavaScript and you don’t have any dependencies on Google servers? AMP as a subset of existing HTML is fine, but at that point it’s just a style guide. AMP as the existing invasive species it is just adds more complexity to an already complex web “ecosystem.” Google did not invent or even perfect maintainable web pages so why should I have to “grab” anything from them on the supposedly decentralized web?
Google's amp cache presumably enforces the "you can only use these specific html tags and this limited subset of javascript" (or whatever the requirements are). That's valuable.
"Some people are so deeply lost in their hatred of AMP that they cannot even consider for a moment that maybe, just maybe, AMP actually does work well for some people."
My assumption is that AMP is most heavily used by news organizations because of the requirement (recently rescinded) for carousel placement. Anecdotal, but I've talked with people at these organizations, and they definitely don't like AMP. They tolerate AMP solely for the carousel placement. That requirement is gone now. But, given the low margins in those places, it may be some time before they migrate off.
Not just news, any website that still monetizes on the ad-supported "blog" model. So, videogame websites, sports websites, entertainment/gossip sites, you name it.
> The article is also surprised that people are still using AMP now that it's no longer required
It feels like we read different articles, because the in one I read the author spent a lot of time explaining that AMP would probably be around for a while for a number of predictable reasons.
> "because in the author's mind, AMP is so god dang awful that when given the chance, everyone would immediately want to get rid of it"
You must be a mind reader, then, because nowhere in the article does the author state or imply that. Indeed, they go out of their way to point out why it's unlikely in the extreme that any publisher will bother, and points out why that's essentially a victory for Google -- indeed this might be the essential point that the author is making in this article.
Fun think about core web vitals and amp: AMP pages will _always_ win core web vitals, because they're measured from google's CDN, where they can be pre-rendered. Unless the page is motherfuckingwebsite.com, the AMP version is going to score better in every metric than a non-AMP version. Core Web Vitals just cements AMP as a shortcut to performance.
Have you directly compared the live version against that in the AMP Cache?
The idea that PSI preloads the page before starting the test doesn't make much sense at all, and doesn't mesh with my own experiences (in the same space).
I've decided that while Google ostensibility makes it possible to search the world's knowledge*, that's just the bait. Google's main product is selling ads in what amounts to a glorified yellow pages.
*In reality, about 1% of human knowledge, by some estimates.
You make it sound like searching 1% of human knowledge is not a fucking big deal. The Harry Potter books created an awesome series of magic, with instant teleportation, flying objects and invisibility coats. Yet they had nothing comparable to Google, which would have destroyed the plots to at least 3 books since the answers could have been found trivially that way.
It's not that 1% isn't astounding, it's that choices, human and automated that go into deciding which 1% is cataloged. Are the Harry Potter books really more valuable than 99% over everything else humans know? Or does Google simply provide a catalog of the things that can be pressed into service to generate revenue, either for themselves or their ad-buying customers?
> As part of this update, we'll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.
Maybe browsers should accept the text/markdown mimetype natively, instead of AMP. Covers 80% of the usecases, with a drastic reduction in complexity and pageload times.
Which Markdown though? Common mark, Gitlab, etc? Do we get any extensions? I like tables.
HTML is not bad and it is easier to parse than markdown, the trouble is javascript and the ways ads abuse them. Strip that out, set the size of images and you can create a better experience for your users without changing all browsers.
However if we can get wild requests for new content types, then I would love text/latex, so that I could create a website that fits the real size of your browser and render a gorgeous output.
Accept headers can negotiate extensions I suppose, but browsers can decide what they’d like to support, same as the rest of HTML standards.
In the last decade, I’ve seen browsers drop content types (FTP) and adopt media formats (WebP). But no new publication formats. If my browser can render PDF, why shouldn’t it render Markdown?
The power of the web lies in its decentralisation,
it lies with its messiness, it lies with its edge
nodes – that is, with you and me.
The only reason I've ever seen a news site take more than 2.5s to load was when it was stuffed to the gills with adtech and trackers; caping for them is literally the _opposite_ of "the spirit of the web".
- It's really nice and maybe unprecedented to have an alignment of business, user, eng, and seo goals. Google is using it's monopoly to change roadmap priorities across the industry. The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user.
- Google's guidance on how the scores work and when changes will be incorporated into rankings / carousel eligibility has been overall poor. The info is out there but changes constantly and comes from myriad sources.
- Similarly, the way these scores are measured are a bit of a secret sauce. It's impossible really to model user behavior / devices in a way that ensures you will hit your performance targets. Google provides a lot of tooling/instrumentation, but the measurements sometimes conflict with one another.
I could go on. I'm the mst senior FE guy at this company and it's really consumed most of my work hours since last June, but that's kinda par for the course in publishing. Google swings it's weight around and publishers react.