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Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

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191–200 of 238 posts

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

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…

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.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#192
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The "People also searched for" popup causes layout shifts nearly every time you go back to the search page

I've also noticed that particular bit of irony. In fact it's the longest-running CLS issue I've seen anywhere.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#193
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When Google first announced their metrics, people showed how most Google sites failed pretty hard.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#194
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#195
post #91

It's funny that Google says they care about performance, yet the number one reason for bad performance on many site is Google Adsense ads. Did no one in Ads team get the memo to optimize performance?

It makes sense. People only tolerate so bad a performance overall. The faster the rest of the page, the more room is left for Google AdSense.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#196
post #16

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…

Damn, I didn't realize that. I assumed it was some Google-bot analysis.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#197

Is there anything official from Google saying Amp is no longer affecting mobile search result rankings? I haven't been able to find anything.

> 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.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for...

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#198
post #187

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 goo…

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 th…

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?

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#199
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

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 sit…

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.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

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…

How does WebP improve rendering times?
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