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.
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.
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.
Reinventing the web the long way around, in a way that gives Google even more control of it. No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.
Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.
Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.
At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:
- The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
- The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread
An excellent piece by Maciej on the crucial difference between individual privacy and ambient privacy (and what that means for regulation):
Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.
Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.
That is not consent.
For more detail, I highly recommend reading his testimony to the senate hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy.
Aaron knows what he’s talking about when it comes to authentication, and Apple’s latest move with sign-in for native apps gets the thumbs up.
Sign In with Apple is a good thing for users! This means apps will no longer be able to force you to log in with your Facebook account to use them.
This does not mean that Apple is requiring every app to use Sign in with Apple.
Andrew looks at AMP from a technical, UX, and commercial perspective. It looks pretty bad in all three areas. And the common thread is the coercion being applied to publishers.
But casting the web aside and pushing a new proprietary content format (which is optional, but see coercion) seems like an extraordinarily heavy handed way to address it. It’s like saying I see you have a graze on your knee so let’s chop off and replace your whole leg. Instead, we could use the carrot of a premium search result position (as AMP has done) and make it only possible to be there if your site is fast.
He’s absolutely right about how it sounds when the AMP team proudly talk about how many publishers are adopting their framework, as if the framework were actually standing on its own merits instead of being used to blackmail publishers:
It is utterly bizarre to me, akin to a street robber that has convinced himself that people just randomly like giving him their money and has managed to forget the fact that he’s holding a gun to their head.
Bruce wonders why Google seems to prefer separate chunks of JSON-LD in web pages instead of interwoven microdata attributes:
I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.
What if accessibility were a ranking signal for Google search results?
Here’s a thought: what if Google put its thumb on the scale again, only this time for accessibility? What if it treated the Lighthouse accessibility score as a first-class ranking metric?
I completely agree with every single one of Terence’s recommendations here. The difference is that, in my case, they’re just hot takes, whereas he has actually joined the AMP Advisory Committee, joined their meetings, and listened to the concerns of actual publishers.
He finds:
- AMP isn’t loved by publishers
- AMP is not accessible
- No user research
- AMP spreads fake news
- Signed Exchanges are not the answer
There’s also a very worrying anti-competitive move by Google Search in only showing AMP results to users of Google Chrome.
I’ve been emailing with Paul from the AMP team and I’ve told him that I honestly think that AMP’s goal should be to make itself redundant …the opposite of the direction it’s going in.
As I said in the meeting - if it were up to me, I’d go “Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process.”
I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!
This is a fascinating story of psychological manipulation and internal politics. It leaves me feeling queasy about the amount of power wielded by individuals in one single organisation.
The bait’n’switch is laid bare. First, AMP is positioned as a separate format. Then, only AMP pages are allowed ranking in the top stories carousel. Now, let’s pretend none of that ever happened and act as though AMP is just another framework. Oh, and those separate AMP pages that you made? Turns out that was all just “transitional” and you’re supposed to make your entire site in AMP now.
I would genuinely love to know how the Polymer team at Google feel about this pivot. Everything claimed in this blog post about AMP is actually true of Polymer (and other libraries of web components that don’t have the luxury of bribing developers with SEO ranking).
Some alternative facts from the introduction:
AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web.
Weird …because that’s exactly how it was sold to us (as a direct competitor to similar offerings from Apple and Facebook).
It’s not an SEO thing.
That it outright false. Ask any company actually using AMP why they use it.
It’s not a replacement for HTML.
And yet, the article goes on to try convince you to replace HTML with AMP.
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.