Live data from Hacker News

Web by Google (TM)

landshark.io

31–40 of 496 posts

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#31

AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse…

It's a lot of effort to maintain AMP pages for all your site content alongside the standard pages over time. That's why they tend to degrade.

This is by design.

They want your canonical web page to be AMP.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#32
post #10

> And let’s not forget that most people now access the web via mobile devices, 75% of which run Google’s Android. Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines. Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use. I imagine if you told the user they could have a brow…

Firefox mobile is good but not as convenient for using Google maps

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#33
post #29
post #10

> And let’s not forget that most people now access the web via mobile devices, 75% of which run Google’s Android. Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines. Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use. I imagine if you told the user they could have a brow…

No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions.

> No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions.

Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu?

They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#34
post #2

It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft. I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.

So another large company will take them over. We need to legislate this now to avoid this endless cycle

Why?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#35

You can blame Google for a lot - however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.

[deleted]

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#37
I posted a while ago about how chilling it was to me how dysfunctional Google Search (and really, every search engine) is these days. It is still your best-bet "front door to the web," and it's been fundamentally broken by the pivot towards ML-based natural language search (e.g., dropping of whole search terms to fit the model of what it "thinks" you're searching for), its bias towards recency and "brands," and its inability to properly index the content on platforms like Facebook.

The result is that large swaths of the web are essentially inaccessible. It's contracting. I feel it as acutely as amnesia.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#38
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that Amazon dominates a lot more than just retail on the internet. With AWS they effectively run large portions of it as well.

Isn't that kinda like saying that the electric companies do the same thing, though?

Yes but that's why they're classified as a utility

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#39
post #10

> And let’s not forget that most people now access the web via mobile devices, 75% of which run Google’s Android. Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines. Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use. I imagine if you told the user they could have a brow…

Firefox mobile is good but not as convenient for using Google maps

> Firefox mobile is good but not as convenient for using Google maps

Agreed, but I think the native Google Maps app is superior than any browser experience.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#40

The issue is not the fact that Google owns the web. It is that the web itself has become decimated to the point where a company like Mozilla does not have a future. Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index. Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.

You could make a case that all the 'social' platforms serve a fundamentally different need than the Web. Those are all more about immediate communication of lots of relatively ephemeral, low-information messages. The Web is more suited to publishing more enduring, long form and complete information.

Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.

Post reply on HN