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.
Good to see Google, Mozilla, and Apple collaborating on fixing cross-browser CSS compatability issues:
You can track progress here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.
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.”
I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:
From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.
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.
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?).
A browser extension that will highlight the actual search results on a Google search results page—as opposed to Google’s own crap. Handy!
Or you can use Duck Duck Go.
James has penned a sweeping arc from the The Mechanical Turk, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Good news: as of May 2021, page speed (or core web vitals, if you must) will be a ranking factor in Google Search.
Even better news: at the same time, Google AMP will lose its unfairly privileged position in the top stories carousel. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for Google’s failed experiment in forcing publishers to use their tech.
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
A simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Looks good for adactio.com, thesession.org, and huffduffer.com …but clearleft.com is letting the side down.
Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.
Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.
In the meantime, use Firefox
Cassie pointed me to this very nifty tool (that she plans to use in your SVG animation workshop): choose font from Google Fonts, type some text, and get the glyphs immediately translated into an SVG!
The unfair collusion between Google AMP and Google Search might just bite ‘em on the ass.
This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.