My toxic trait is that I believe that if a site can't be bothered to gzip it's MB+ of JS, browsers shouldn't bother to load it.
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My toxic trait is that I believe that if a site can't be bothered to gzip it's MB+ of JS, browsers shouldn't bother to load it.
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@slightlyoff imagine a browser plugin that enforced that. You go to a site and it renders (extremely quickly) a holding page that says "This site technically sucks and so you should try somewhere else"
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BasiqueEvangelistreplied to Alex Russell last edited by
@slightlyoff question: did this actually go anywhere? was it rejected from chromium or something?
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Alex Russellreplied to BasiqueEvangelist last edited by [email protected]
@BasiqueEvangelist There was a big (internal) fight about it on the Chrome team, and people liked my throw-away idea (Core Web Vitals) better and went all-in on that. I warned CWV would take many years to launch, which turned out to be sadly more true than even I'd anticipated, and that it wouldn't bite hard enough...which also came to pass.
We're taking a second look at this in Edge right now. I'm cautiously optimistic.
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Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
@BasiqueEvangelist For clarity, I love CWV and think it's having a big impact. But it was undermined even before launch by unscrupulous (former) Googlers that wanted their slow stuff to not trigger "slowness" warnings (they know who they are and what they did). Annie and her team have done incredible work to fix what others broke (e.g., INP), and it's having a big impact. But it's very late and much less than we needed to make the mobile web competitive
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@slightlyoff I wonder if that is too harsh and rather browsers introduced a user facing UI aspect like a tree icon that showed site impact kind of like withered, barren and vibrant that tracked to resource use. “Get the user aware, so the builders care” glibly.
My agency has found that if we can get a conversation going corps often want to do right, but sadly there is little incentive to pay other than "doing the right thing" since quality is not valued unless consequence felt.
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@thomasapowell Oh, I don't think that should be the *only* intervention, and I very much want to build solidarity through uniform and objective good/bad marker criteria.
One sketch for that was here: