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

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

#231

Post by onli »

bcrl wrote: post #227
onli wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#232

Post by onli »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #189
onli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can not scroll faster than images load. 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 :)

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

#233

Post by nybble41 »

scott_w wrote: post #203
wyager wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No service involves “nothing but data.” May I introduce you to services such as Wikipedia.com and news.ycombinator.com?

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.

> information about topics of interest that you can edit

Which is literally just data.

> a forum through you can interact with other people

Which is just a means of exchanging data.

What is missing in both cases is any transportation of people or material across the border.

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

#234

Post by moritzwarhier »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #190
onli wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not talking about browser features, I'm talking about the lazy loading JavaScript libraries that many (most, I'd wager) use.

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.

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

#235

Post by moritzwarhier »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #127
djtriptych wrote: post #66

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…

* 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…

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...

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

#236

Post by bcrl »

onli wrote: post #231
bcrl wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#237

Post by WillPostForFood »

onli wrote: post #232
WillPostForFood wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not scroll faster than images load. 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 exper…

I know this reply is days late, but I hope you see it. :)

This is an example of what I am talking about.

https://clayimports.com/collections/colors

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.

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

#238

Post by onli »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #237
onli wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exper…

I know this reply is days late, but I hope you see it. :) This is an example of what I am talking about. https://clayimports.com/collections/colors 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.
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