Adactio: Links—Tagged with google

Goomics

These comics by a former Googler give a cumulative insight into the decaying culture there.

Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web – Jorge Arango

We’ve enjoyed a relatively long period when we didn’t have to think about which browser to use. Alas, that period is ending: I must now keep Chrome running all the time, much like I needed that PC in the early 2000s.

Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search

I don’t know if AMP is quite dead yet, but it feels like it would be a mercy to press a pillow down on its face.

Google’s stated intention was to rank sites that load faster but they ended up ranking sites that use AMP instead. And the largest advertising company in the world dictating how websites can be built is not a way to a healthier and more open web.

Google Workspace Updates: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions

Yikes!

We’re updating the way Google Docs renders documents. Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.

I’ll be very interested to see how they handle the accessibility of this move.

Performance-testing the Google I/O site - JakeArchibald.com

Modern web development:

Imagine you went to a restaurant, took a seat, and 20 minutes later you still haven’t been given a menu. You ask where it is, and you’re told “oh, we’re currently cooking you everything you might possibly ask for. Then we’ll give you the menu, you’ll pick something, and we’ll be able to give you it instantly, because it’ll all be ready”.

Single page apps, ladies and gentlemen.

A quick look at privacy-focused analytics for small sites

A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.

Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know. | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Following on from the piece they ran called Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, the EFF now have the details of the origin trial and it’s even worse than what was originally planned.

I strongly encourage you to use a privacy-preserving browser like Firefox or Safari.

Compat2021: Eliminating five top compatibility pain points on the web

Good to see Google, Mozilla, and Apple collaborating on fixing cross-browser CSS compatability issues:

flexbox
grid
position: sticky
aspect-ratio
transforms

You can track progress here.

Au revoir, mon AMPmour? — Ethan Marcotte

I’ll say again: deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing. But it’s worth noting that Google’s taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight.

The End of AMP – lafoo – ramblings about the online world

Google provided a distinct advantage to sites using AMP – priority placement on the world’s largest traffic source – Google search. I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. Let me package that up for you – Google, the most dominant search engine globally – used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain. How is that legal? Well, I’m not a lawyer, but it possibly isn’t.

The death of AMP can’t come soon enough.

If you’re currently using AMP, you’ll be able to get rid of that monstrosity in May, and if you aren’t, you’ll now be competing for search positions previously unavailable to you. For publishers, it is a win-win.

Daring Fireball: Google’s Outsized Share of Advertising Money

Same hat!

Privacy-invasive user tracking is to Google and Facebook what carbon emissions are to fossil fuel companies — a form of highly profitable pollution that for a very long time few people in the mainstream cared about, but now, seemingly suddenly, very many care about quite a bit.

RFC 8752 - Report from the IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem (ESCAPE)

During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.

Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics

Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.

Ignore AMP · Jens Oliver Meiert

It started using the magic spell of prominent results page display to get authors to use it. Nothing is left of the original lure of raising awareness for web performance, and nothing convincing is there to confirm it was, indeed, a usable “web component framework.”

History of the Web - YouTube

I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:

From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.

As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google to Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred Mobile Technology – The Markup

More great reporting from Adrianne Jeffries at The Markup.

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

The Core Web Vitals hype train

Goodhart’s Law applied to Google’s core web vitals:

If developers start to focus solely on Core Web Vitals because it is important for SEO, then some folks will undoubtedly try to game the system.

Personally, my beef with core web vitals is that they introduce even more uneccessary initialisms (see, for example, Harry’s recent post where he uses CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. I mean, WTF?).

Link tags: google

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