
Web.dev by Google - mxschumacher
https://web.dev
======
bitofhope
This is useless to me because I have a website, not a web application. I got a
46/100 on PWA which is astonishing because the site being tested is not a
progressive web application at all. Imagine vim getting a 40/100 score in the
category of web browsers. Weirdly good score.

The accessibility audit is garbage as well. Apparently I should add an image
to the site just so I can put an alt attribute in it. I should include audio
so I could have a transcription to go with it. Not sure whether Lighthouse
decided that 16px or 20px is less than 12px but apparently one of them is and
makes up over 60% of the page.

I understand this is not made for people who serve static HTML files and
handmade CSS from ~/sites/ but I'm pretty sure I hate the kinds of sites this
is designed for. Should have a custom splash screen? Respond with 200 when
offline? What's next, I get points for breaking the back button too? Why is
using HTTPS and redirecting HTTP to it a PWA thing?

I'd hate to see the site that aces this audit.

~~~
KevanM
This, so much this.

The skew to web applications rather than websites for tooling has been very
disappointin and myopic view of what a 'website' is.

It would make sense if I could give it a root URL and then a robot
progressively ran tests over a month and then reported back, but one URL is a
drop in a vast ocean for most of us.

~~~
Yaggo
Properly made "web application" doesn't have to break the web. It can be
curled, links work, back button works, etc. You just don't get any
interactivity (besides links) without javascript, but it still works as
browseable site (rendered server-side). You can have the cake & eat it.

(I'm not saying that every application should behave like that. Often the
extra work is not worth it. But a public, content-heavy site should behave
like that, whether it was single-page app or tradiotionally implemented.)

~~~
pmlnr
This is called progressive enhancement and, sadly, nobody seems to be doing it
any more.

~~~
SquareWheel
Progressive enhancement is different than what the parent comment is
suggesting. They are describing how to correctly write SPAs and other webapps.

The reason progressive enhancement has fallen away is because Javascript
support is now ubiquitous. Your browser has it. Your screen reader has it.
Even web crawlers have it.

~~~
acdha
> The reason progressive enhancement has fallen away is because Javascript
> support is now ubiquitous. Your browser has it. Your screen reader has it.
> Even web crawlers have it.

That's only part of the problem: every day I encounter sites which fail
because the developers assumed not just that everyone has JavaScript but that
they can load tons of assets reliably and instantaneously. The key part of
progressive enhancement is thinking about how to degrade gracefully when
everything doesn't work perfectly, which also tends to offer a better
experience for anyone who doesn't have a very high-speed near-perfect network
connection.

A couple of weeks back, I was using a family member's Spectrum “high-speed”
cable modem service at a whopping 5Mbps with latency measured in the hundreds
of milliseconds. It really highlighted who was doing progressive enhancement
and who was doing “works on my machine” when you saw one page load 90 seconds
faster than the other.

~~~
SquareWheel
I'd put network use in a different category. It is an important issue though.

Thankfully the tools are getting better for this. The recently supported font-
display property is a great one. It allows devs to choose how to handle web
font rendering over slower internet connections.

Now I just wish more devs would start to take advantage of all the great
performance tools available. Those best practices are unfortunately rarely
taught.

~~~
collinmanderson
for font-display, do you prefer swap or fallback?

~~~
SquareWheel
It might depend on main body text versus title text. It's jarring when body
text changes so I'd prefer fallback in that case. For a title which might have
more branding concerns, I'd prefer swap.

------
yandrypozo
I just ran their audit to [https://mail.google.com](https://mail.google.com),
you guys (googlers) need to speed up your websites first, Gmail is terrible
slow lately, just saying...

~~~
partiallypro
Google's pagespeed service is hot garbage. You can do things that make the
page load significantly slower and get a perfect score than if you had a lower
pagespeed score with a much faster page load.

I also find it strange how I can get an A on every other page speed service,
including GTMetrix, but get an F on Google's tes(s). Totally useless.

~~~
billyhoffman
Isn't GTMetrix just a combined Page Speed Insights and YSlow audit?

~~~
josefresco
I never pay attention to the "grades" only the data, especially the waterfall
graph/data. The grades are ridiculous, and mostly meant to cause alarm. You
can score 100/100 on almost every test, but get a "D" overall because you
scored poorly on 1 or 2 tests. It's great tool for techs, but in the hands of
a client almost every result/score appears terrible.

------
billyhoffman
This is powered by Google Lighthouse, with the benefit of it being done via a
web UI instead of a Dev Tools Audit. Which is both good and bad.

Good because Lighthouse has some reasonable best practices to follow, and a
few good performance timings, so lowering the barriers of entry is nice.

Bad because many of Lighthouses best practices aren't always applicable (our
major media customers constantly say "stop telling me a need a #$%ing Service
Worker!"). And while Speed Index and Start Render are great, Time-to-
interactive, First CPU idle, and estimated keyboard latency are still fairly
fluid/poorly defined, and of different value.

This all also overlooks the value that something like the Browser's User
Timings provides (Stop trying to figure out what's a "contentful" or
"meaningful" paint, and let me just use performance.mark to tell you "my hero
image finished and the CTA click handler registered at X"), which Lighthouse
doesn't surface up.

What is interesting is the monitoring side. WebPageTest, Lighthouse, Page
Speed Insights, YSlow, etc are just point-in-time assessments that is largely
commoditized. Tracking this stuff over time and extracting meaningful data is
valuable, so that's pretty cool.

Disclaimer: I work in the web performance space. People replace homegrown
Lighthouse, puppeteer, or WPT instances with our commercial software, so I'm
biased. However I like a lot of the raising awareness and trail blazing about
what Performance/UX means that Google is doing.

~~~
vntok
Why don't you want to implement a basic service worker? A couple of cache
strategies among these ones seem like a net positive?
[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-
and-o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-and-
offline/offline-cookbook/)

(ex: "Cache, falling back to network" for CDN'd libraries, "Cache then
network" for content like news articles)

~~~
pmlnr
Because for a normal website, it should be taken care by the browser, and not
my custom service worker.

This is XMLHttpRequest all over again.

------
zwaps
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE WEBDEVS, STOP LOADING YOUR WEBSITE WITH CRAP TO MAKE THEM
BETTER

I fed a large news site that is not terrible to use into this, and it gave it
14/100 rating. This news site is perfectly fine, has a good design, good
typography and loads without any scripts if you need it to. It loads quite
fast.

Among other things, Google recommends \- Lazy loading: NOOOO, just load my
document. I hate this bullcrap. It never works correctly and then you just get
a laggy and slow scrolling site where you have to wait all the time you use
it. It's a news site. Just load the whole thing, it takes a couple of ms but
then the site is actually usable! It's an actual document you can scroll
through.

\- Ask the user to install as an app, add offline usage etc? Why even?

\- Dynamically compress everything? YES GOOGLE, when saving 8kb per picture,
but in the end we need to pull 10mb of javascript libraries from sixty
different sources all over the web to even display a text with one small
picture ITS ALL WORTH IT

I don't make websites except my personal stuff. I understand you want to
present your knowledge and skills. But please, the websites are getting worse
and worse. The best way to present almost any information is in a classic html
webpage. It wouldn't need to be like this, but almost any modern websdesign
approach seemingly leads to slow, laggy and partly unusable websites, that do
end up loading something, but often not the thing I actually want to read.

I am actually trained now to feel a sense of relief if I come across a
straight html website, just because the user experience is so terrible now
thanks to javascript.

As a consumer, I will continue to beg for simple websites that stay true to
the idea of displaying a scrollable document with data and text.

Please, only use all these animations, loadings, dynamics, off-site
frameworks, custom browser controls and single page documents if you are
making a) a portfolio b) an actual application that is mostly simple buttons
and does not present significant amounts of text or data

thank you

its bad guys

~~~
Zelphyr
I agree with you about lazy loading. It's just dumb. How is it better to give
me a scaffold of a page before the content? The page may look nice but is
unusable until the content has loaded. Why not just give me everything when
it's ready?

I've gotten into trouble for saying this before but things like recommending
lazy loading is an example of Google imposing their wishes on the web and
making it worse in the process.

~~~
alexbecker
There are two kinds of lazy loading--that which blocks the content, and that
which doesn't. If you have e.g. a bunch of JS libraries that aren't necessary
to display the page, only for certain interactions, it makes sense to lazily
load those. This is what "lazy loading" meant in my front-end team at Google
anyway. (Whether you should even _have_ all of this JS to begin with is
another question, however.)

------
NelsonMinar
Talk about breaking the back button! Do a measurement on a website. Then click
one of the Guide links like "Links do not have a discernible name". Page
navigates away from the report to some documentation. Click back, report is
gone.

I get it, it's a single page webapp. But if you do that you need to make all
the simple navigations open new tabs. There is a "open link in new button"
icon next to each link, but that's really not good enough.

~~~
robdodson
Ah yeah that's something we want to fix. If you're signed in it keeps the
report around but if you're signed-out it's stateless. It's definitely on our
to-do list to fix.

~~~
koboll
Maybe just throw on a target='_blank', no need to do anything fancy

~~~
sniuff
it's stateless

------
alib
This site didn't load properly in Firefox on a Samsung Galaxy S8 just now, and
the accessibility section is "coming soon". I'm sorry Google, but if you're
letting key basics like this slip... Accessibility is not a bolt-on for
afters, and chrome isn't the only web browser. Deep down you know this too.
Those who preach are held to higher standards, and you've let yourselves down
badly here.

~~~
magicalist
> _This site didn 't load properly in Firefox on a Samsung Galaxy S8 just now_

Check your extensions. It loads fine for me.

> _you 've let yourselves down badly here._

...because an article on accessibility is "coming soon"?

~~~
alib
I can't replicate it in private browsing. I'm not running any mobile
extensions and my internet is as good as it comes. First time I loaded it the
blue line at the top was there for ages. I was scrolling the site for a good
20 secs marvelling at the irony of a site teaching performance not performing.
It felt like something to do with the service worker not working. The cookie
notice only appeared after I refreshed. Now it works fine, and loads fine each
time. So it was something to do with the initial caching of assets.

And yes, the accessibility section coming soon sends the wrong message very
subtly but powerfully. It's something we all need to be better at, and when
you've got the resources of Google there just isn't any excuse. Those two
small words on that missing section quietly absolve us all. Because if Google
can't do it right, why should we? It just isn't good enough, so yes, they have
let themselves and our community down. I know they're strong words, but
someone needed to say it.

~~~
magicalist
> _The cookie notice only appeared after I refreshed_

Maybe it's a geo thing. Are you in Europe? I see no cookie notice (US).

> _I know they 're strong words, but someone needed to say it._

Eh, it needs to be there but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's
apparently in "beta" and according to this hn thread robdodson is working on
it, so odds are the accessibility section will be handled just fine.

Regardless

> _Those who preach are held to higher standards_

is a bad take. You can criticize a tutorial site without standing on such a
flimsy soapbox.

------
tinyvm
Google is really pushing Hard on PWA.

My biggest concern is the support outside of chrome.

While other browsers tend to come on pair with chrome in terms of features ,
chrome right now is the only one which supports PWA as "native" app..

Windows announced support for PWA natively a while ago [0] but there has been
no news since then.

On Apple side it's silence radio...iOS have some support but for Mac it seems
unlikely to happen...

[0][https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/02/06/welcoming-
pro...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/02/06/welcoming-progressive-
web-apps-edge-windows-10/)

~~~
ubersoldat2k7
The funny/sad thing about PWA and how broken it's on iOS right now, is that
the first iPhone was supposed to work with PWA. I'm not sure if it was Jobs'
vision or they didn't have something good to offer for native devs. Safari has
been a joke for long time now.

~~~
mr_toad
That was before they started printing money from the App Store.

------
crazygringo
Why am I getting:

Error: 403 from Lighthouse API: Forbidden

whenever I try to run the audit on any of my sites hosted on Digital Ocean?
They all load normally in my browser...

Anyone else having the same issue?

~~~
nacs
I have a feeling they've hit some kind of API limit for their own Lighthouse
service ironically.

------
iambateman
This looks kinda cool.

I have a hard time believing this is "for web developers" when most web
developers used `.dev` for local development, which was broken because Google
decided they wanted to own `.dev` for themselves.

Bad taste in my mouth.

~~~
NelsonMinar
It might be time to let this one go.

~~~
omeid2
Slowly boiling the whole web.

------
stupidbird
I can't wait for one of the executives in my company to run into this,
understand nothing but the numbers, and then complain about our numbers not
being higher despite the fact that half of these metrics aren't applicable to
our web app.

I already have a boilerplate response to "why isn't our google pagespeed score
higher" that I copy and paste.

I know Google's happy about performance nagging, but I wish they were better
at knowing what is/isn't applicable.

~~~
kaycebasques
I agree that this is a problem. See my other comment in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442686)

~~~
stupidbird
Thanks for reading through the comments.

I do agree that some sort of "not all these metrics may be applicable to your
architecture, please consult an engineer" would go a long way.

I left a toxic work environment at one point where I was literally yelled at
because I was claiming to know our company's situation better than Google's
pagespeed tools.

Needless to say, that wasn't the only problem with that job... but it's
frustrating.

------
amaccuish
ICANN were foolish to go down the new TLD root. Why should Google have
ownership over web.dev, and not mozilla (MDN) or w3c?

~~~
acheron
Foolish how? Sure, it kind of ruins DNS, but ICANN made a lot of money, and
isn’t that the important thing?

------
paulddraper
Will someone please elucidate which Google resources are still relevant?

* [https://web.dev/](https://web.dev/)

* [https://developers.google.com/speed/](https://developers.google.com/speed/)

* [https://developers.google.com/web/](https://developers.google.com/web/) (including [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/))

~~~
robdodson
Heyo! One of the web.dev devs here. The new web.dev site is an experiment from
our team to see if we can improve the interactivity of our docs. We link to
developers.google.com/web in a number of places. Over time, if folks seem to
enjoy the web.dev model, we may explore moving more of our docs over there.
But for now it's just a fun experiment

~~~
chimen
I like that material design. Can you share the tech stack it was built with?

------
xg15
> _Easily discoverable

Ensure users can find your site easily through search._

> _Installable

Be on users’ home screens with no need for an app store._

It's nice that they educate devs on the rules they themselves came up with. I
just wouldn't call it "how to build a better web" then.

------
arendtio
> Accessible to all - Coming Soon

Probably the frontend joke of the last two decades... And a bad one too.

------
fhdhehfhzhe
Looks like this - [https://webhint.io](https://webhint.io) Why not collaborate
with the people who’ve made this first, google?

~~~
feb
The similarities with webhint are striking. For example they have mostly the
same categories :

* Performance (exactly same as webhint)

* PWA (exactly same name as webhint)

* Accessibility (exactly same as webhint)

* Best Practices

* SEO

Webhint also has categories Interoperability and Security. Not sure what
web.dev uses for those.

~~~
fhdhehfhzhe
Plus it’s open source and welcomes contributions
[https://webhint.io/docs/contributor-
guide/](https://webhint.io/docs/contributor-guide/)

------
scrame
I tried my rather large work website and it was unable to fetch it after a
couple tries.

Also this is the same company that brought us AMP and didn't use closing tags
on their landing page to "save bandwidth", and tried to push a java ->
JavaScript nightmare of a gui toolkit. I don't get why they are trying to push
for this unless it's trying to strongarm devs into making more shitty AMP
pages.

------
RugnirViking
The hacker news homepage gets a 23 on accessibility (Idk I mean there are
probably some issues I hadn't thought of but the fact that its primariliy no-
nonsense text makes it quite accessible by default)

It does however get 100 on performance (quite rightly) The PWA score is around
50 but most of the complaints are really silly. It almost makes me wonder if
the entire category of PWA is silly.

Finally, I checked GOV.UK, the website so lauded here on hacker news as of
late. It also got around 58 on PWA - what is the point? If those complaints
for PWA actually meant anything, surely they could fit into one of
accessibility, best practises, or performance.

------
hornetblack
"Imagine if your favorite game took forever to load because you were on a slow
network connection, it wouldn't be your favorite game for very long. "

I can inform you that games I play take forever to load on slow networks.
(Overwatch, Darksouls). Although I guess it's not downloading the game. It's
just trying to login to the servers.

------
Whitestrake
I find myself disappointed that they took away `.dev` as local development
TLD, and this is what they start using it for.

------
TonnyGaric
I get the message "Error: 500 from Lighthouse API: Internal Server Error" when
I try to run audit for my personal website
[https://tonnygaric.com](https://tonnygaric.com)

Anyone any clue why? Other websites I enter seem to run without a problem.

------
pestkranker
It's actually Lighthouse under the hood.

------
apatheticonion
Tried to run it on my site and got "Error: 403 from Lighthouse API: Forbidden"

------
seanhunter
I'm amazed by how far off-base they have managed to make this. The
recommendations are bizarrely inaccurate.

1)it says that my (black) text doesn't have sufficient contrast against my
(white) background. 2)It says that my page could benefit from having more of
its resources served by http 2 (more than 100% presumably). 3)It says that
links should have a name (this is not supported by html5) 4)It says my (100%
valid) robots.txt file is not valid 5)it says my 100% no javascript static
webpage which isn't a PWA should return a 200 when offline. Not sure how they
think I should do that.

------
crooked-v
I wonder how many things will break when .dev domains become broadly
available.

~~~
ripexz
They're already "broken" on Chrome for a few versions now, we switched all
`.dev`s to `.localhost` in dev environments at my company.

~~~
geerlingguy
I've switched all my stuff to .test, since that domain doesn't cause as many
weird issues with some routers, proxies, OS networking bugs, dumb regex, etc.

Also, .test is reserved for testing/local forever, so it won't suffer the same
fate as .dev.

------
d--b
Interesting that they’re not selling AMP in there. They most likely didnt dare

------
nh2
> Accessible to all

The website itself doesn't seem to take that too seriously.

For example, it loses scroll position when navigating:

* go there from HN * scroll down a bit * press the Back button in the browser to go back to HN * press the Forward button in the browser to go to the site again * you are now scrolled the very top again, instead of where you scrolled to

Tested in curren Chrome and Firefox on Linux.

Also note how HN doesn't have this problem, it will remember your scroll
position so you can continue reading where you left off.

Browsers are smart, they have accessibility built-in. Too clever JavaScriptery
destroys it.

------
shinryuu
I get that the site can't be reached.. ? Is it a valid site?

~~~
danillonunes
It has been a common practice for devs to setup a local DNS server that points
any *.dev domain to localhost. Maybe you did it (or installed some tool that
did it) and forgot.

~~~
sandov
>or installed some tool that did it

I would love to see an example of this. Software-gore.

------
cyberferret
Getting Chrome SSL warnings on both the OP link and
[https://get.dev/](https://get.dev/)

Doesn't really evoke confidence, if this is a Google initiative. Can someone
post a short precis as to what this is about for those of us who cannot visit
the URLs?

UPDATE: Apologies - My bad, not Google's fault. I had a local Valet/NGINX
redirect for local .dev domains setup for Laravel development projects that
was causing the issue.

~~~
CydeWeys
Can you post a screenshot of the certificate you're seeing? It sounds like
you're being MITMed. It works fine in Chrome for me.

Oh, and this is definitely a valid Google initiative. Source: Work for Google,
am involved in this.

~~~
cyberferret
Ah, OK, I think I worked out what is happening. I have a valet service running
for local Laravel development which is redirecting local .dev subdomains to
Valet instances on my iMac!

Apologies for that - I will shut down the Valet service and try again.

~~~
CydeWeys
Valet fixed this last year. Recommend that you update:
[https://github.com/laravel/valet/pull/436](https://github.com/laravel/valet/pull/436)

Although that might only change the default for new installs; you might still
need to change it for existing installs. I'm not sure; I've never used
Laravel.

------
iamunr
So sad to see .dev go. :(

~~~
CydeWeys
Precisely the opposite -- it's going to be available for open registration
soon. [https://get.dev/](https://get.dev/)

~~~
partiallypro
Do you have to use Google's registrar service? That page isn't clear, and if
you have to use Google's service, I don't view that as a good precedent.

~~~
CydeWeys
No, it will be available across a wide range of registrars, similar to .app.
You can see the full list of participating registrars for our existing TLDs
here: [https://www.registry.google/register-a-
domain/](https://www.registry.google/register-a-domain/)

------
weinzierl
It only accepts https URLs. Lighthouse in the DevTools can do both, http and
https.

~~~
robdodson
Yep that's our mistake (one of the web.dev devs). We auto added https to every
URL. Oops! Gonna fix that as soon as we are out of our code freeze

~~~
danillonunes
> one of the web.dev devs

web.dev^2

~~~
Jaruzel
What dev does a web.dev dev when a web.dev dev devs?

------
robdodson
Hey folks, I wanted to share a quick status update to let y'all know which
issues we're seeing and working on. Apologies for the hiccups and thank you
all for trying the beta!

[https://medium.com/dev-channel/web-dev-status-
update-11-12-1...](https://medium.com/dev-channel/web-dev-status-
update-11-12-18-f9b42a693f65)

~~~
jansan
Much appreciated, thanks!

------
modernerd
Web.dev looks incredible for educating web developers, exposing Lighthouse to
devs who aren't already familiar with it, and for automating basic website
testing over time.

But it will be a nightmare for support teams working at any kind of web
service.

As Google doesn't provide support for this tooling and site owners invariably
fixate on the scores it provides, product support teams for everything from
WordPress themes to CDNs end up fielding support questions that Google should
be helping with via resources pitched at the non-technical folks who
inevitably use these tools (as well as, you know, help from an actual human
support team).

As it stands, support teams will now be inundated with questions unrelated to
their product from customers who have no interest or technical background to
read the current educational sections of web.dev, and whose time would be
better spent crafting landing pages, great content, or reducing the 38 social
plugins they're using instead of making all the dials turn green.

I can already foresee the support requests from the web.dev scores:

“Google says my WordPress site isn't installable. Where's the option for that
in your theme?”

“Your website says Cloudflare improves load time. But my first meaningful
paint time went up by 1.5 seconds after setting it up! I'm going to write bad
reviews about you.”

“Google says I need to theme my browser's address bar to match my branding. I
added that tag they mention but don't see any change in my browser.”

It's great to build awareness of ways to make the web faster and better, but
it needs to be backed with guidance that's pitched at the ability of the
people who will be using these automated testing tools.

For example, why not detect the technology behind the site and — for stuff
like WordPress — recommend plugins or other tech-specific resources that could
help fix problems like lack of image lazy-loading? There are lots of ways
education could be enhanced for non-developers.

~~~
exodust
But it's a resource for web devs, mostly used by web devs. Reinforced by the
web.dev domain name, which surprised me. I've never seen .dev domain before.

All audit tools make recommendations that many of us will ignore. I have zero
intention of using webp images for example.

I don't think your claim that "nightmares" will happen is warranted. Shiny new
site audit tools are fun. Enjoy it, there's no nightmare!

------
LolNoGenerics
Over a decade of experience... with service workers! Nice trick, leave time
travel to spock et al.

------
bhartzer
There's so much wrong with this report, it can be confusing to many people.

For example, some of what they're calling "SEO" really has nothing to do with
SEO. It should be checking: \- if the page is crawlable \- if there is a valid
title tag \- if there is a valid meta description tag \- if there is a valid
canonical tag

But instead, it checks for a valid viewport meta tag? And if the font sizes
are legible? I could see that it might be an issue if the site is hiding text
on the page, but viewport and font sizes really have nothing to do with SEO.

~~~
hajile
I could be wrong, but I thought these were things Google used when ranking
sites (especially for mobile).

------
yoz-y
I have a question. How can I really figure out whether my (static) website
uses http2? The google audit tells me that I should use http2 for all of my
resources but loading my site in Safari or Chrome shows me that it uses the h2
protocol. Or are these unrelated?

Weirdly it also points out that my elements have non-unique Ids which is false
and the list of failing elements shows that, it looks like they are stopping
their search at the colon character, but they should not.

------
ramshanker
Error: 403 from Lighthouse API: Forbidden

------
skunkworker
If you have an old version of Pow installed. Make sure to either upgrade to
Puma-dev (Which moves .dev to .test, the correct subdomain for local machine
testing) or uninstall it first.

------
pasta
Has anyone viewed the report? It's full of elements never used on the sites I
checked.

While it is still in beta (like all Google products are) don't take this
serious.

------
mangatmodi
The tool is having scaling issues due to their seemingly unexpected fame on HN
- [https://medium.com/dev-channel/web-dev-status-
update-11-12-1...](https://medium.com/dev-channel/web-dev-status-
update-11-12-18-f9b42a693f65)

------
masswerk
Regarding accessibility: Are skip links still a thing, or has this been
superseded by landmark roles? Is there still an advantage in using a link as
compared to selecting a region?

Edit: Meaning, if I have already a main region, does adding a skip link to
main actually complicate things?

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thinkloop
The results are significantly different from the lighthouse audit in chrome's
web developer tools, the latter shows my site as PWA compatible with great
performance whereas this tool shows that my site is not PWA ready and has
medium performance.

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artiya4u
Error: 403 from Lighthouse API: Forbidden If you're using Cloudflare.

~~~
guessmyname
No, the CDN doesn’t matters.

It is happening with Google’s services as well.

See my report here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437749)

------
ithrewthat4351
How about we just give back .dev for registration free? :)

~~~
empyrical
They are opening it up now: [https://get.dev/](https://get.dev/)

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zimpenfish
Bizarrely refuses to use HTTP/2 to my nginx (curl, Firefox, Safari all use
HTTP/2 happily) and then dings me for it. Seems a bit unfair.

------
k__
Only works for HTTPS.

~~~
robdodson
Yep that's our bad. We accidentally started prefixing all of the urls with
https we've fixed the bug but haven't shipped it yet cuz we're in code freeze

------
stabbles
Try and compare cnn.com with lite.cnn.com. Or (if you're Dutch) compare nos.nl
with noslite.nl. All hail text only news websites.

~~~
mangoleaf
Agreed! I love the text only sites. I would add text.npr.org to the list also.
I am very tired of sites that spill media and JavaScript all over the place
and add no real value, just to slow the site down or to make it completely
unusable. A typical site of mine breaks all the rules of current UI design.
[1]

[1] [http://vqRN.com](http://vqRN.com)

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voycey
Still pissed that they registered .dev as a TLD

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koib
What if there's a login/auth wall before getting to the actual page you want
to test?

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bananatron
This is just lighthouse? You can run these tests in chrome under dev tools >
audit.

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codesternews
Wow amazon.com results are quite impressive. Have not thought it has 95
performance.

------
vini
Error: 500 from Lighthouse API: Internal Server Error

Is all get when I try to test my website.

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technion
Given this says it's in beta, can anyone see where I can report a bug?

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NKCSS
I think I broke Google

> Error: 500 from Lighthouse API: Internal Server Error

~~~
chrismorgan
I tried a couple of other sites first, successfully, then I tried asking it
about [https://web.dev](https://web.dev), and that’s when it fell over.

------
zwaps
PWA = Poorly made Web Application

for those who don't know

------
intea
Google only scores 80 in the SEO Category...

------
jjordan
Must be nice to have all the money in the world to purchase any domain you
want.

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rblion
won't load...

------
thetruthseeker1
doesn’t work on http

------
progressiveweb
My question is, why do we need a React/Redux for PWAs all the time? It is slow
on cellular data, freezes phones without the latest Chrome, all in all feels
laggy compared to a native app.

The thing is you can easily add "Progressiveness" to your website with Service
workers and using open source libraries to add instant on-page navigation
without repaint.

The only place I find an SPA is appropriate is anywhere else but e-commerce
websites, which is one of the main target of Google's PWA initiative, to build
a collective resistance to Amazon, which has one of the highest converting
pages.

Your conversion rates will naturally go up when people are able to checkout
quickly with minimal cognitive load, this does not mean that a React app is
appropriate or feasible, especially when e-commerce businesses that rely on
older phones, when smartphones are approaching 1000 USD

------
throwaway487548
Which framework is this? Material-what? What is Google's Bootstrap
alternative?

It does not look like Angular (which is a J2EE all over again), at least.

Update: I did some research

    
    
        cd material-components-web-codelabs/mdc-101/complete
        grep version package-lock.json |wc -l
        943
    

No. Just no.

------
keyle
Wow. From the people that have been botching the web for 20 years...

I mean it's only recently that they've started getting their things together.
And arguably their flat design isn't always usable. Now let's talk speed....

------
hardwaresofton
In case you're wondering what's in it for google with PWAs/App
manifests/"Installable apps"[0], it's answered in another recent HN post[1]
and comment[2].

I wrote and deleted a pretty vitriolic comment about not trusting google as
stewards of anything, people who care about the user (outside of selling
data/access to the user millions of times a second), but I couldn't figure out
why they would push app manifests (the only interesting part of the actual
comment).

[0]: [https://web.dev/installable](https://web.dev/installable)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18434639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18434639)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18435412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18435412)

