
Google adding “Fast page” label to Chrome browser - ziodave
https://www.coywolf.news/seo/google-adding-fast-page-label-to-chrome-browser/
======
Normille
This is such a load of bollocks!

Just for the 'lulz', I once ran one of my blog sites through Google's website
speed analyser thingy. I'm quite proud of the leanness of the site in
question, as it's a pretty lightweight SSG which uses no external resources,
and has some very minimal hand-written JS and CSS [so no bloated frameworks].

Needless to say Google informed me that the site was not optimised and
recommended a load of improvements, most of which seemed to consist of loading
a heap of junk from Google which would have increased the size of the site
many times over.

AMP needs to die and this proposed "Fast Page" banner in Chrome is just
another example of Google trying to edge out websites which don't contribute
to their near monopoly on search indexing and advertising.

~~~
rckoepke
I tried Google's PageSpeed Insights (is that what you were using?) for the
following sites. In at least one case it recommended removing Google Analytics
to improve speed.

(Score) URL

(100) [http://esp32.rosskoepke.com/](http://esp32.rosskoepke.com/)

(100) [https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

(100)
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

(100) [http://news.ycombinator.com/](http://news.ycombinator.com/)

(98)
[https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/](https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/)

(91) [https://docs.python.org/](https://docs.python.org/)

(85) [https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/)

(69) [https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/](https://doc.rust-
lang.org/stable/book/)

(46) [http://news.google.com/](http://news.google.com/)

(17) [http://www.medium.com/](http://www.medium.com/)

(11) [http://www.reddit.com/](http://www.reddit.com/)

It's certainly something where reasonable people could disagree but to me
these scores match up well with my own personal perceptions - the Rust docs
website is about the most sluggish I'd like a website I use regularly to be
and it's in the middle of the "orange zone". Also it notably issues failing
scores for it's own property (Google News) as well as Medium, which uses
Google Analytics.

I looked through the suggestions it provided for each of these websites, and
the only recommendation I saw for using Google/Alphabet properties or
technologies was to use to:

"Serve images in next-gen formats (save 3.3 seconds): Image formats like JPEG
2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG,
which means faster downloads and less data consumption. Learn more." It then
listed all the images and their sizes under PNG (current format served by
Reddit) vs. their size using one of these compression formats. WebP is a
Google technology, but JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR are not.

For the poorest performer, Reddit, it recommended that as well as:

Avoid an excessive DOM size (currently 1,663 elements): Consider using a
“windowing” library like `react-window` to minimize the number of DOM nodes
created if you are rendering many repeated elements on the page. Also,
minimize unecessary re-renders using shouldComponentUpdate, PureComponent, or
React.memo and skip effects only until certain dependencies have changed if
you are using the Effect hook to improve runtime performance.

For the discussion forum,
[https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/](https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/) the
tool only had 2 recommendations:

Remove unused CSS (1.35 s) Remove dead rules from stylesheets and defer the
loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content to reduce unnecessary bytes
consumed by network activity

Eliminate render-blocking resources (1.08 s) Resources are blocking the first
paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring
all non-critical JS/styles.

For [https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)
it's top time-saving recommendation was....to remove Google Analytics.

Avoid long main-thread tasks (2 long tasks found) Lists the longest tasks on
the main thread, useful for identifying worst contributors to input delay.

URL Duration

/analytics.js(www.google-analytics.com) 105 ms

~~~
Normille
It might have been PageSpeed that I used. I can't remember for sure. It was a
long time ago, back when Google were first pushing their AMP stuff.

If it was that tool I used, maybe they've improved it since then, or maybe it
works better on more complex sites. As I said, my site was very lean and
dependency-free and the suggestions offered [at the time] would have made it
more bloated, slower and relying on external dependencies.

EDIT: Dredging my memory, I think one of the 'problems' identified was the
recommendation you've mentioned above to use more modern image formats.

Ironic because I'd only recently shaved quite a bit off the size of the
imagery on the site by redesigning several of them [including the main banner]
in svg format. I think Google also recommended I use image _srcset_ [0] to
optimise the images the site displayed, dependent on the end-user's screen
size. That would have not only made the site bigger and arguably slightly
slower but would also have required production of lots of extra image assets,
whereas the svg approach I'd used actually made the site smaller and, being
vector-based, svg can be served at any size required.

As I say, they may have improved the tool since then. But I got the impression
at the time it was pretty crude. Seemed it just checked whether the site
employed X and, if not, recommend that it should, regardless of the fact the
site might actually implement Y instead, which was even more efficient.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/HTMLImageEl...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/HTMLImageElement/srcset)

------
evolve2k
Is the measure of speed the one you’ll get from running a lighthouse report in
Chrome or is it referring to some other speed ranking metric they planning to
use?

In other words, how do you measure your page to see if it counts as a “fast
page”?

