I disallow my blog from being indexed by Google. While they obviously don't care, and really all it does it deny me a large percentage of my traffic (it's a small personal blog, so it doesn't hurt me), if enough people do it or if even one of my posts gets popular for some reason and people are looking for it, Googles results suffer. This seems like a good protest. I always encourage people to put a "No AMP" link at the bottom of their blog or similar, deny Google in robots.txt, and link it to a post or page that explains why you're no longer allowing Google (this one is good: https://uglyduck.ca/dear-google-im-blocking-you-from-my-webs...).
I have to disagree with his final suggestion, lazy loading images for a faster load. In my opinion, unless your page is extremely image heavy, lazy loading images causes more problems than it solves. It's a janky and annoying user experience every time I scroll a Medium post and have to wait a few seconds waiting for a big blurry square to pop into an image. I would much rather that stuff was loading eagerly and ready for me when I scroll.
Not to mention, knowing about their ecosystem, I shudder to think of the size of some of these JS libraries performing the lazy loading.
I've got to agree. Lazy loading is obnoxious and unnecessary. Browsers already load images from top to bottom, so unless your site is already extremely slow, you gain nothing from it. It also makes sites feel slower, since instead of reading a paragraph, and scrolling down to see an image, you read a paragraph, scroll down, and find an image loading.
Is that true? I believe that they kick off the requests to load images from top to bottom, but I don't think they prioritise bandwidth in such a way that downloading image #3 will never make downloading image #1 slower.
That is my understanding as well and I checked mozilla documentation to confirm. [0] That link also covers loading="lazy" attribute for <img> tags, which I've commonly used to defer loading.
I find that the optimal solution is to load all images 'above the fold' (perhaps optimizing for a 'tall' screen) and lazy-load the rest, when they get close to being on-screen. if possible I also try to make sure loading these images doesn't change the flow of the page, but in most cases images have to fit/cover fixed dimensions anyways.
HN Users be like, "We need to wake people up to Google's tyranny! If we act as one, we can overcome Google's bad faith practices!" No, dummy, everyone is going to keep using Chrome, Google will become more evil by the day and there is nothing you and your anti-Google larping can do about it. And they know this.
The best thing you can do is vote for Trump in 2020, vote Republican for the rest of your life, go and adamantly tell them that you want anti-trust suits opened against every single Tech co. over 1B. This seems like a partisan post, but you need the state to solve these problems, and Google and the DNC are clearly in bed together, and also Google and the GOP are also somewhat in bed (Google sponsors CPAC), so you need 20 years of Trump-like figures - outsiders - to solve these problems.
Of course you have to make some ideological concessions to start supporting people like Trump and to thus start the process of breaking up Google, but I think that ideological concessions and real progress win out over cringe larping about "quitting Google Chrome." Google is laughing at these types of blog posts while they roll around in their 750 billion dollar mountain of cash.
When I read something like this, I come away feeling sad. It's a well-intentioned essay, written by someone who understands why websites are slow. It pleads with readers to not make their websites slow and preserve their sovereignty on their own domains.
I'm not sad about any of that. I'm sad because the author skips right past a key point: how we got here. Why are websites slow, when there are good reasons to want to be fast? In my opinion, this isn't some kind of cosmic accident. It's not because most people building websites don't care or are incompetent.
Slow websites are, to my mind, a symptom. The disease is that there are economic incentives to do the things that make websites slow. Well-intentioned software engineers and web developers who like fast, light, clean websites are often not positioned to win the political battles required to cut unnecessary elements, third-party scripts, and so on.
Openness and respect for user privacy are wonderful, incredibly appealing things. I don't think I've ever been able to lean on then to convince other parts of a company to forego revenue, reach, or measurability. This could easily be an effect of my limited skills of persuasion.
Me too. So many of those postings seem to read "[something] is a problem with [list of ill effects] and I wish it would go away, but I have zero interest in learning about how or why this came to be".
I just came to despise Google search five minutes ago, when I tried to search for "SpaceX launch" and it did not give link to the official NASA live streaming page, even after I added "NASA" search term. NASA's website was not even on the first page. Mostly various news agencies like New Yorker, WaPo or NYT.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 62.4 ms ] threadTrying to submit https://markosaric.com/google-amp/?dummy=234 results in "Unknown or expired link"
Not to mention, knowing about their ecosystem, I shudder to think of the size of some of these JS libraries performing the lazy loading.
Is that true? I believe that they kick off the requests to load images from top to bottom, but I don't think they prioritise bandwidth in such a way that downloading image #3 will never make downloading image #1 slower.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...
The best thing you can do is vote for Trump in 2020, vote Republican for the rest of your life, go and adamantly tell them that you want anti-trust suits opened against every single Tech co. over 1B. This seems like a partisan post, but you need the state to solve these problems, and Google and the DNC are clearly in bed together, and also Google and the GOP are also somewhat in bed (Google sponsors CPAC), so you need 20 years of Trump-like figures - outsiders - to solve these problems.
Of course you have to make some ideological concessions to start supporting people like Trump and to thus start the process of breaking up Google, but I think that ideological concessions and real progress win out over cringe larping about "quitting Google Chrome." Google is laughing at these types of blog posts while they roll around in their 750 billion dollar mountain of cash.
Fear not, however: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730 is there to fill your AMP-fighting needs.
I'm not sad about any of that. I'm sad because the author skips right past a key point: how we got here. Why are websites slow, when there are good reasons to want to be fast? In my opinion, this isn't some kind of cosmic accident. It's not because most people building websites don't care or are incompetent.
Slow websites are, to my mind, a symptom. The disease is that there are economic incentives to do the things that make websites slow. Well-intentioned software engineers and web developers who like fast, light, clean websites are often not positioned to win the political battles required to cut unnecessary elements, third-party scripts, and so on.
Openness and respect for user privacy are wonderful, incredibly appealing things. I don't think I've ever been able to lean on then to convince other parts of a company to forego revenue, reach, or measurability. This could easily be an effect of my limited skills of persuasion.
I hope others have had different experiences.
Cf. Chesterton's fence.