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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

It reads to me as an attempt from Google to further shame people into following better practices, like when they started factoring HTTPS into search rankings.

I think the principle is a fine one (though it is a bit odd considering the web's main source of slowness is ads/tracking tech, and... that's Google's main business). But in practice I'd bet that - like most of Google's broad-strokes efforts - there will be many edge cases/outliers where people get penalized unjustly, and there won't be an appeals process.

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> further shame people into following better practices

"Better" as prescribed by who? At this point, I'm under the impression that if you're not implementing AMP for content, Google is going to rank you lower and now publicly shame you to users. They _say_ this is not the case, but it's impossible to ignore now that they're introducing naming and shaming. It just seems like features way outside the scope of what a web browser should be providing to users.

Editing to add my other thought:

I've built websites that routinely score horribly on Google's proprietary PageSpeed Insights despite fixing everything within my power (usually Google's own analytics scripts score badly), but also score very high on every other reasonable industry test of similar nature. It's hard to convince me that they alone should be an arbiter for this type of feedback given to users.

> Google's proprietary PageSpeed Insights

The previous version of PageSpeed Insights was open source (https://github.com/pagespeed/page-speed) and the current version is a wrapper around Lighthouse which is also open source (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse).

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

I believe you, obviously. I have historically received drastically different results between, for example, web.dev / Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights with the latter outputting a very low arbitrary 'rating' or 'score' and the former providing results I would expect. Like a lot of efforts at Google, things seem duplicated. As an outsider, it is a frustrating experience catering to Google's performance ideals because the tools and 'best practice' positions do not seem to be unified in one place.

I wonder if you might have had a bad experience with the old rules-based PageSpeed Insights? It wasn't as good as the current one, being more of a checklist of "have you done all these things that usually help" and not "we loaded the page, computed metrics, and this is how well it did".

I just checked one of my sites with their tools. Performance 34/100. Biggest issue Google's own ad tech. Third party code blocking the main thread.

https://imgur.com/a/RM8JkbI

Yep. Looking at it cynically, this could be a way of playing hard-ball with web admins: "if you want to keep using Google stuff, and you don't want this badge of shame, you better use AMP"

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