Link tags: google

Diary of an Engine Diversity Absolutist – Dan’s Blog

Dan responds to an extremely worrying sentiment from Alex:

The sentiment about “engine diversity” points to a growing mindset among (primarily) Google employees that are involved with the Chromium project that puts an emphasis on getting new features into Chromium as a much higher priority than working with other implementations.

Needless to say, I agree with this:

Proponents of a “move fast and break things” approach to the web tend to defend their approach as defending the web from the dominance of native applications. I absolutely think that situation would be worse right now if it weren’t for the pressure for wide review that multiple implementations has put on the web.

The web’s key differentiator is that it is a part of the commons and that it is multi-stakeholder in nature.

The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com - Signal v. Noise

Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.

👏

In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.

Listen To Me And Not Google: HeydonWorks

We have to stop confusing the excesses of capitalism with the hallmarks of quality. Sometimes Google aren’t better, they’re just more pervasive.

cough AMP cough

The People’s Web

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren’t designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren’t run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be again.

This really hits home for me. Anil could be describing The Session here:

They often start as a labor of love from one person, or one small, tightly-knit community. The knowledge or information set that they record is considered obscure or even worthless to outsiders, until it becomes so comprehensive that its collective worth is undeniable.

This is a very important message:

Taken together, these sites are as valuable as any of the giant platforms run by the tech titans.

Building a More Honest Internet - Columbia Journalism Review

The dominant narrative for the growth of the World Wide Web, the graphical, user-friendly version of the internet created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is that its success has been propelled by Silicon Valley venture capitalism at its most rapacious. The idea that currently prevails is that the internet is best built by venture-backed startups competing to offer services globally through category monopolies: Amazon for shopping, Google for search, Facebook for social media. These companies have generated enormous profits for their creators and early investors, but their “surveillance capitalism” business model has brought unanticipated harms.

It doesn’t have to be this way, says Ethan Zuckerman:

A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. We’ve seen a wave of innovation around tools that entertain us and capture our attention for resale to advertisers, but much less innovation around tools that educate us and challenge us to broaden our sphere of exposure, or that amplify marginalized voices. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer – Marko Saric

• Don’t use Google search
• Don’t use the Chrome browser
• Don’t use AMP on your own sites
• Why are so many sites slow in the first place?
• Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web
• How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Keynote Address at ADL’s 2019 Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate | Anti-Defamation League

On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.

Surveillance giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights | Amnesty International

Amnesty International have released a PDF report on the out-of-control surveillance perpetrated by Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.

However…

This page on the Amnesty International website has six tracking scripts. Also, consent to accept tracking cookies is assumed (check dev tools). It looks like you can reject marketing cookies, but I tried that without any success.

The stone PDF has been thrown from a very badly-performing glass house.

Firefox’s fight for the future of the web | Technology | The Guardian

A good overview of the unfair playing field of web browsers, dominated by the monopolistic practices by Google and Apple.

Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web.

Chromium Blog: Moving towards a faster web

It’s nice to see that the Chrome browser will add interface enhancements to show whether you can expect a site to load fast or slowly.

Just a shame that the Google search team aren’t doing this kind of badging …unless you’ve given up on your website and decided to use Google AMP instead.

Maybe the Chrome team can figure out what the AMP team are doing to get such preferential treatment from the search team.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search

Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements.

This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:

…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.

Quitting Analytics

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people. On the surface, it seems like a convenient proxy, but it’s not. They’re just numbers. If you’re searching for business insights, talking to real people beats raw data any day. It’s not as convenient, but when is anything worth doing convenient?

Same-Site Cookies By Default | text/plain

This is good news. I have third-party cookies disabled in my browser, and I’m very happy that it will become the default.

It’s hard to believe that we ever allowed third-party cookies and scripts in the first place. Between them, they’re responsible for the worst ills of the World Wide Web.

Why These Social Networks Failed So Badly

Ignore the clickbaity headline and have a read of Whitney Kimball’s obituaries of Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, OpenSocial, ConnectU, Tribe.net, Path, Yik Yak, Ello, Orkut, Google+, and Vine.

I’m sure your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is perfectly safe.

Less… Is More? Apple’s Inconsistent Ellipsis Icons Inspire User Confusion - TidBITS

The ellipsis is the new hamburger.

It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.

Plaidophile: So about that AMP-script thing

Reinventing the web the long way around, in a way that gives Google even more control of it. No thanks.

Taking shortcuts ･ Robin Rendle

How Robin really feels about Google AMP:

Here’s my hot take on this: fuck the algorithm, fuck the impressions, and fuck the king. I would rather trade those benefits and burn my website to the ground than be under the boot and heel and of some giant, uncaring corporation.

Paint Holding - reducing the flash of white on same-origin navigations  |  Web  |  Google Developers

This is an excellent UX improvement in Chrome. For sites like The Session, where page loads are blazingly fast, this really makes them feel like single page apps.

Our goal with this work was for navigations in Chrome between two pages that are of the same origin to be seamless and thus deliver a fast default navigation experience with no flashes of white/solid-color background between old and new content.

This is exactly the kind of area where browsers can innovate and compete on the UX of the browser itself, rather than trying to compete on proprietary additions to what’s being rendered.

Amphora. — Ethan Marcotte

There’s no sugar-coating it—AMP components are dreadfully inaccessible:

We’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.

Toast

Chris describes exactly why I wrote about toast:

But we should be extra watchful about stuff like this. If any browser goes rogue and just starts shipping stuff, web standards is over. Life for devs gets a lot harder and the web gets a lot worse. The stakes are high. And it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to happen with little tiny things like this. Keep that blue beanie on.