Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.
There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.
What happens when you’re AMP pages are slower than your regular pages …but you’re forced to use AMP anyway if you want to appear in the top stories carousel.
AMP isn’t about speed. It’s about control.
The elephant in the room here is pre-rendering: that’s why Google aren’t using page speed alone as a determining factor for what goes in the carousel.
147 dead properties and counting.
Tim takes a closer look at this Google Lite thing.
My first reaction to this was nervousness. Of all the companies to trust with intercepting and rerouting page requests, Google aren’t exactly squeeky clean, what with that whole surveillance business model of theirs.
Still, this ultimately seems to be a move to improve the end user experience, and I’m glad to see this clarification:
Lite pages are only triggered for extremely slow sites, so we encourage developers to measure how well their pages are currently performing over slow networks.
Lite pages as a badge of shame (much like AMP in my eyes).
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
This seems to work quite nicely: convert your progressive web app into an APK file that you can then submit to the Google Play store (you’ll still have to go through all the hassle of submitting the app, but still).
I tested this with The Session and sure enough, it looks like it’s available to download from Google Play.
A list of alternatives to Google’s products.
Mozilla comes out with all guns blazing:
Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.
The marketing people at Microsoft are doing their best to sell us on the taste and nutritional value of their latest shit sandwich piece of news.
We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Losing [browser] engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.
When’s the last time you can remember that a framework was given preferential treatment like AMP has been given? You could argue that it’s a format, like RSS, but no one has ever tried to convince developers to build their entire site in RSS.
I’m with Tim on his nervousness about Google’s ever-increasing power in the world of web standards.
Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.
I guess this domain name is why our local developmemnt environments stopped working.
Anyway, it’s a web interface onto Lighthouse (note that it has the same bugs as the version of Lighthouse in Chrome). Kind of like webhint.io.
This instance of collective action from inside a tech company is important, not just for the specifics of Google, but in acting as an example to workers in other companies.
And of all the demands, this is the one that could have the biggest effect in the US tech world:
An end to Forced Arbitration.
Another directory of progressive web apps, this time maintained by Google.
I quite like the way it links through to a Lighthouse report. Here’s the listing for The Session, for example, and here’s the corresponding Lighthouse report.
Even using a strict cookie policy won’t help when Facebook and Google are using TLS to fingerprint users. Time to get more paranoid:
HTTPS session identifiers can be disabled in Mozilla products manually by setting ‘security.ssl.disablesessionidentifiers’ in about:config.
Like banging your head against a proprietary brick wall.
To me this is all just another example of a company operating a closed process, not willing to collaborate openly as peers. The Ivory Tower development methodology.
I’m heartened to see that Google’s moving to make the AMP format more open. But this new governance model doesn’t change the underlying, more fundamental issues: specifically, Google’s use of its market dominance to broaden AMP’s adoption, and to influence the direction of a more decentralized and open web.
The incentives that Google technology created were very important in the evolution of this current stage of the web. I think we should be skeptical of AMP because once again a single company’s technology – the same single company – is creating the incentives for where we go next.
A thorough examination of the incentives that led to AMP, and the dangers of what could happen next:
I’m not sure I am yet willing to cede the web to a single monopolized company.
Feedbin has removed third-party iframes and JavaScript (oEmbed provides a nice alternative), as well as stripping out Google Analytics, and even web fonts that aren’t self-hosted. This is excellent!