Hacker News Reader

Comment by Felz | Hacker News Reader

This seems a bit like a complication that browsers shouldn't be handling? Like really, do we need this feature baked into the web forever, just to make it easier for websites to audit their performance?

A cynical part of me notes that adding more complexity to browsers just makes Chrome monoculture easier: I have no doubt that Google can win any war of "throw developers at it". But it feels like they're building a complexity debt nightmare that we'll all suffer from.

Edit: I guess the other and more direct angle for why Google would push this is that they can give "fast" sites a ranking boost in search, i.e. dictate what web pages do via soft power to make their job easier.

View on HN

I think the real motivation is to allow Google to use guaranteed never-slowness as an unspoofable ranking signal, essentially creating an alternative to AMP that doesn't require special tags or libraries.

Yea, that's kind of what I meant to say, although I wasn't thinking about AMP. Can Google really not use the vast amounts of data it ingests to deduce which sites have bad user experiences and are slow, though? Shouldn't that be their core competency?

Yes, Google's crawler already calculates page speed yet they've observed that few popular sites are fast. Another aspect of AMP and NSM that I didn't mention is that they are binary; this prevents sites from adding just a little more bloat and then just a a little more after that until they're quite slow.

> they can give "fast" sites a ranking boost in search

They can already do this though, right? They can even use the same criteria.

I guess the difference is they wouldn't have to measure it themselves and they could just trust the browser to enforce it. But they already have to execute the web page to get the indexed content, and the limits they're imposing here seem to be unworkable for most SPA's, since the document-level restrictions around things like images break down if you're going a long time without reloading the page. So it's only indexed content that would ever enable this in the first place.

The only benefit I can see is that it would allow them to bake the UI into the browser, which would make it more obvious to users. And that's great, except for the tiny problem that performance isn't binary and different browsers and environments will want to have different standards.

None of the restrictions here apply to service workers. Why not? Why shouldn't browsers like Opera Mini be able to apply a different list of restrictions that include service workers? And if we're OK with browsers applying extra restrictions, than what's the value of standardization?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com