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Google promises publishers an alternative to AMP
Google's AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole. Ideally, this means that users will profit from Google's efforts and see faster non-AMP sites across the web (and not just in their search engines).
Publishers, however, will once again have to adopt a whole new set of standards for their sites, but with this, Google is also giving them a new path to be included in the increasingly important Top Stories carousel on its mobile search results pages.
"Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel," AMP tech lead Malte Ubl writes today. "This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible."
Also at Search Engine Land and The Verge.
Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:50AM (3 children)
One of things I've found successful, was reactionary and precise pushback that doesn't remove the quality of life one has been accustomed to. Think uBlock : Ads, not NoScript et al. In one of my own codebases, we were able to modify the SpiderMonkey JS engine to emulate Chrome's V8 (among other privacy patches that make your browser completely indistinguishable from a Windows 10 Chrome, even on Linux) for the very bare necessities, and then pass fake info for everything else. Less than 1% of the browser population uses/ does not have JavaScript enabled (don't look at industry data from fingerprinting companies, this one statistic is misinterpreted/lied about). Our assumption was that NoScript severely lessens the user's experience, while offering intangible benefits. So we worked the opposite. The insecure cruft was removed in favor of simple pseudo-data outputters. What's left is already fast and stops most egregious abuses of JS, but we still added little user-enhancements here and there to make it more "real" (like rate-limiting and scaling CPU usage, so coinminers don't lock out a core). Then slap a simple installer script onto it, and you have people giving a shit now. In the SaaS world, this is called "friction," i.e how fucking hard do you make it to achieve your intended goal?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
Would it also be considered "precise pushback" to block scripts that the end user isn't allowed to understand and improve [gnu.org]?
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)
You're not gonna get people to disavow JS using a logical argument. They're going to have to get consecutively more and more sick of it, until everyone drops it for the newest flavor of [insert hyped up tech here].
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:16PM
"Non-free" is hard. "Not machine-readably labeled as free" is easy. Block everything by default and allow only those scripts whose developers have specified their license [gnu.org]. I'd be interested to see which would be the first adtech company to answer the LibreJS challenge.