
Moving towards a faster web - joeyespo
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/11/moving-towards-faster-web.html
======
reaperducer
Google Capone: "Hey, nytimes.com, your site loads awful slow. We're gonna have
to put this badge of shame on it for everyone to see.

Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through us,
I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically
disappear..."

~~~
flukus
> Now, if you just dumped your other ad networks and ran everything through
> us, I bet it would be load much faster and that badge might magically
> disappear...

My experience with everything google has touched lately suggest that this
wouldn't improve speed any. Gmail and youtube make continental drift look
speedy and even the search page takes 1.4MB and takes over a second to load
for me (maybe corporate network issue), that's approaching the size of doom to
display a dozen links.

Google doesn't have any moral authority when it comes to bloat.

Edit - for reference HN takes about the same time to load, but that has to
cross the pacific ocean whereas google supposedly has local data centers.

~~~
Avamander
The only PC where I saw Gmail being fast was a Ryzen 9 3900x build, I suspect
that if Google devs were given shittier PCs they'd build faster products that
would appeal more to the average user.

~~~
cameronh90
I run a Core i5-2500K from 2011 and Gmail runs just fine. Far better than
Thunderbird or Outlook ever did, but it does take a lot of memory.

~~~
zbrozek
I have a Google-issued corporate workstation with 64 GB of RAM and 12 cores.
Gmail is really really slow. Like so slow that I if I have to refresh it I'll
go get coffee. But I'm on Firefox, and so "I Am Not The User" and all that.

~~~
cameronbrown
IMO the best way to use Gmail is to open and pin it, only load once a day. It
seems optimised for this use case.

------
neiman
I'm trying to fully understand it.

So if I'm in a site that is loading slow, Chrome will tell me "this site is
loading slow". which is almost like putting a sign in the middle of the ocean,
"you in the ocean". Like, a person should notice it on its own, right?

Ok, I understand they mean to tell me that it's slow loading due to the fault
of the site, and not due to (let's say) my bad internet or device. But I think
that most people don't understand those kind of technicalities, and don't
really care to know them. I see it, as someone else put here, a "badge of
shame".

Moreover, it's kind of regulating the internet. No one gave Google the mandate
to regulate the internet.

There are two other problems with this "speed above everything else" approach.
First, what is fast depends on how the browser parses websites, so one website
can be faster in Firefox but slower in Chrome, and still get a "badge of
shame". There's no standard here afaik (perhaps I'm wrong).

Second, the internet is supposed to be a place of equality, where kids,
experimental artists and businesses all get the same respect and treatment.
But businesses websites are obviously going to be faster, they got the
professional technical stuff to ensure that, making the other second-rate
internet citizens.

~~~
7777fps
If Google didn't own AMP then I might be less critical of this change. But
they do, and I bet they don't rate any AMP pages served from the Google cache
as slow.

They're determined to make AMP the de-facto way of publishing content and this
feels like just another way of making AMP more appealing.

~~~
tinus_hn
I haven’t seen an AMP page for quite some time, it seems that strategy is
pretty much a failure.

~~~
lasagnaphil
I still see them quite a lot on my iPhone 8... and it's very annoying

------
ipython
This reads to me as an attempt from Google to further balkanize the web. This
looks a lot like the "blue bubbles" effect from Apple iMessage.

Did Google run out of actual features to implement? How about reacting to real
user concerns such as controlling the privacy of their personal data on the
web? Rhetorical question, I know...

~~~
lkbm
Speaking as a real user, let me assure you that website speed definitely falls
under real user concerns. I don't know how much I'd use this indicator, but
loading speed matters to me. Loading speed matters _a lot_.

This won't win me back from Firefox, but I don't consider it a bad move.

~~~
segmondy
Then demand for smaller sites, nothing will make for a faster web if web pages
are larger than operating systems from just a few years ago. do you know how
ridiculous it is to have web pages that are tens and hundreds of megs?

The issue is not with the browsers, it's with the damn stupid sites out there.
3G is pretty much useless out there, let alone 2G.

~~~
koz_
This is an attempt by Google to influence the bloated websites out there,
rather than a browser feature intended to attract users. It's probably mildly
helpful as a user to know if a site is slow (as opposed to it just being slow
for you), but it's a big incentive for a website owner to speed up their site
if this badge of shame appears it for a majority of users.

~~~
weare138
Except of course unless it's one of Google's sites...

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=gmail.com)

Gmail scores a 50% on Google's own PageSpeed. And that's just the login
screen. If Google can't even meet their own metrics and standards then they
have no place telling other people what they should be doing with their
websites.

~~~
Avamander
> If Google can't even meet their own metrics and standards then they have no
> place telling other people what they should be doing with their websites.

The fact that they are failing their own if anything, shows that the tests
don't discriminate. It's defeatist to say that we shouldn't strive for faster
websites if some webpage fails. I really like how dumb f __*s making 40MiB
pages are now finally punished.

~~~
jvzr
Yes, but Gmail doesn't really have to compete in Google Search, does it? So,
in their eyes, it's OK for Gmail to score low because it has its own link in
basically every navigation toolbar/header Google owns. This won't improve the
speed at which Gmail loads, whereas all non-Google websites _will_ have to
improve their speed.

~~~
koz_
It's not that Gmail has a dominant position and so doesn't need to care about
its rating - Gmail is an app not a page and it's less important for apps to
load quickly than pages. Apps tend to be long lived and so a slow startup time
is tolerable, whereas one is constantly opening new pages.

That is to say, I don't think e.g. Trello would really care if their site was
"slow to load" either.

------
throwGuardian
The multitude of comments here scream the same thing:

1\. No one trusts Google to be an impartial judge of speed.

2\. Increasingly, Google is inserting itself as a non-neutral third party
between the end user and creator/developer. Power lies asymmetrically with
Google, and threatens both creators & users.

If anyone from Google is reading, this incremental but definite appearance of
a power grab by Google will only draw more regulation

~~~
cs02rm0
I mostly agree, but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would
suit them. It's win-win.

We should really just stop using Google so much. You go first, I can't be
bothered to switch!

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> but more regulation means higher barriers to entry which would suit them_

That's a recently very popular idea, but in this general form it is simply
untrue. It depends on the specifics of any regulation.

We can regulate oligopolists in a way that doesn't affect anyone else.

------
sakisv
While I appreciate fast loading sites as much as anyone, there's something I
appreciate even more: getting to the content as fast as possible.

It's becoming increasingly common to have all sorts of pop-ups blocking a big
part of the screen at best or adding an overlay across the entire body.

If only I knew that my click would result in that kind of monstrosity I
wouldn't have clicked in the first place. So maybe it would be more useful to
show an of how many things we need to close before we get to the content. I
think that something like this would also help get us to "a faster web".

~~~
musicale
So many sites load 8MB of garbage, often from dozens of domains, just to
display 8KB of text. Then as soon as you try to start reading, an obnoxious
pop-up window appears, demanding that you sign up for their spam list. These
are anti-patterns that need to go away.

~~~
yellowapple
If Google actually gave a damn about making the Web a better place, it'd start
downranking sites with mailing list popups.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I thought they did? Some years ago they (and/or Mozilla) offered an addon
which you could use to report popups like that -
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page-
pop-u...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page-pop-up-
reporter/) comes up.

But so far, nothing's been done yet. This is kinda weird to me because one of
the reasons why Firefox came to power (and took over a bit chunk of IE's
market) was that it had a pop-up blocker. I don't understand why they aren't
doing more to block inline pop-ups now.

------
kiwicopple
It’s crazy how misaligned the incentives are for chrome development.

If performance was the criteria by which they made decisions then they would
probably bake ad-blocking directly into chrome, since ads/tracking is one of
the leading reasons for poor performance.

Instead we are left with PR pieces and false features. It feels like they are
creating a lot of noise to drown out the signal.

~~~
mirimir
> ... ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance.

That's especially obvious when using nested VPN chains and Tor. Because
latency can exceed 500 msec. Sites like HN typically load in a second or two.
But sites with ads and tracking take 10 seconds or more.

------
crazygringo
I appreciate the intent, but why are they putting badges/indicators like this
into Chrome instead of Search?

Sites usually load slowly because because of ads and trackers, and Chrome's
only telling me what I'm already seeing with my own eyes. Plus, I already
decided to visit the site, and it's probably quicker to finish letting it load
than find an alternative source, if one exists at all.

Whereas Search would seem _much_ more useful, since it's where I'm already
presented with _alternative_ links, and can actually affect which one I click.

I know Search already says they de-rank slower sites... but obviously they're
still appearing, especially for the "long tail" of searches. So badges still
seem like win there.

(But the whole concept is sound, I think, because developers often want to
build fast sites but management won't dedicate the resources. But if
management sees Google is giving them a big red mark, that's suddenly
something very easy for them to understand and allow to be fixed.)

~~~
notatoad
from the article: "We are building out speed badging in close collaboration
with other teams exploring labelling the quality of experiences at Google."

We're hearing about this first from Chrome, but that doesn't mean it will
happen in chrome first. I suspect that badges of shame will come to the search
result pages long before they actually show up in chrome. Say what you will
about google's policies, but the chrome team is really pretty good about
announcing this sort of thing well in advance. Look at their multi-year
rollout schedule for the "not secure" badging in the URL bar.

Search results, on the other hand, will just update one day with no warning.

~~~
jfoster
Right, I think they're using Chrome as a testing ground for this.

------
saagarjha
This kind of effort sounds great, but the issue is that Google has already
spent their goodwill on improving the web in this area. Who can trust the
company to implement this fairly? Will Gmail get a “badge of shame” (it surely
deserves one)? Will websites that are fast but don’t use AMP or the new Google
hotness be ranked as they should? There are a lot of questions that I’m sure
many have already answered in their head based on Google’s past efforts.

------
reaperducer
_Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which
may include signals beyond just speed. We are building out speed badging in
close collaboration with other teams exploring labelling the quality of
experiences at Google._

Exactly what does "high-quality experiences" mean? Penalize sites with bad
colors? Sites that are artsy and an algorithm can't understand? Sites that
have been repositories of information for longer than Google has been around?
Sites that don't meet Google's worldview? That disagree with Google's
politics?

~~~
rlv-dan
"Quality" should be reserved for the content and its usefulness. Speed is not
a quality factor. It's a convenience.

------
jjcm
To me this is better than amp - give me clear messaging around a site's
performance rather than mandating a platform that gives the site less control.
I certainly worry that there's the potential to abuse this, and I also wonder
if Google's own sites (i.e. amp pages) will be biased. To their credit they're
showing one of Google's own pages as being slow in the example, but I'd be
interested in seeing a 3rd party analysis of what pages are considered slow
and which aren't.

Another part of me worries that this will lead to a cobra effect[1], where
people optimize a page's first load so Chrome says the page is fast, while
withholding the main content of the page for a delayed load, leading to even
more site bloat. Identifying when a page has actually loaded will be tricky.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

~~~
kaycebasques
See my other comment about how our metrics are designed to capture various
milestones in the loading experience. I think it’s already harder to game a
good Performance score than you might imagine, and it’s only going to get
harder over time as the web platform collectively gets better at metrics:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511477)

------
butz
I prefer Firefox's way of "moving towards a faster web" \- blocking trackers.

~~~
kome
Indeed, it's so much more effective and it has immediate real results.

Also: it's not a "police state" approach. Google loves a good police state.

------
zadokshi
This will give developers leverage to ask for time to optimise, upgrade, and
improve things they are not normally allowed to work on, as it will raise the
discussion to the level of managers and the general public.

However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type
configurations faster out of the box? If it is possible to speed up the
default config of most websites on the internet, perhaps there is an easy win
to be had.

~~~
moreira
> However, do you think more could be done to make the default MySQL/PHP type
> configurations faster out of the box?

I'm pretty sure that most slow websites aren't slow because their server-side
rendering takes a long time. This seems to be mostly a front-end oriented
thing (especially directed at pages that load MBs of JS); basically if the
page doesn't adhere to all the front-end optimisation guidelines.

~~~
_bxg1
The slowness described in the article isn't jank, but time-to-initial-load.
Conceivably the initial client-side render could take a nontrivial amount of
time, but in the vast majority of cases - just like for server-side rendering
- it isn't a deciding factor.

The real deciding factor is the amount of dependencies that have to be loaded.
This includes JS, but usually the JS for ads/tracking is far larger than the
JS for the actual UI, even on fully client-side-rendered sites.

------
danShumway
One of the regular complaints I've pushed against AMP is that it's a hamfisted
way to address page speed. Search placement should be determined by generic
speed tests, not by forcing developers to use Google's technology.

This looks to me like a positive effort. I'm not thrilled with overlays like
this, and I'm not thrilled with baking this kind of stuff into the browser. It
feels over-engineered and weird.

But, I think it's a better direction than AMP.

There are a lot of ways this could go bad, but very cautious thumbs up from
me.

------
TeMPOraL
I hope they won't whitelist their own pages from this. Maybe then they'll
notice Google's own products have a performance problem.

~~~
neogodless
Gmail

Loading...

Usually loads _slow_.

~~~
cpeterso
I think the "Usually loads slow" warning shown in the article is grammatically
incorrect. Shouldn't it say "Usually loads _slowly_ "?

~~~
big_chungus
Came to say this. It seems as though a browser of chrome's scale ought to
spell-check before cutting a release?

~~~
nvrspyx
I'm going to be a little nitpicky here: This would be grammar checking, not
spell checking. "Slow" is spelled correctly, it's just not the right word
(adjective vs adverb).

This also seems to still be in the experimentation phase and is not released
as far as I can tell and may never actually make it into Chromium based on:

> In the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow
> for users with clear badging. This may take a number of forms and we plan to
> experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most
> value to our users.

Regardless, I agree. This probably should've been caught early.

~~~
wruza
Maybe they used adjectives instead of adverbs because it’s both ad-words and
they can no longer feel the difference.

~~~
cpeterso
Your comment about "ad-words" made me think: could Google sell ad space on
these "slow site" pages? Site X might jump at the chance to pay Google to
advertise its service on site Y's slow site page. I'm only half-joking.

------
Wowfunhappy
Generally, I can tell when a website is loading slowly because it, well, takes
a long time to load.

Am I misunderstanding what Google is trying to do? I'm not seeing the use
case.

~~~
andybak
Erm. How do you tell that before you click?

~~~
reaperducer
The screenshot in TFA shows a Google slow site warning _after_ a link to the
site has been clicked.

~~~
andybak
Ah. I hadn't actually looked at TFA.

------
Endy
The best way to have a faster web is to get rid of Google Analytics,
DoubleClick, AMP, "web assembly", WebDRM, ECMAScript (and all derivatives),
and go back to only loading text and images from a blind server to a user-
agent entirely defined by the wishes of the specific user.

But all the stuff that makes the Web slow and pointless to use is how Alphabet
makes money.

So as long as you drink the Google-Aid, you're doomed to a slow web of
garbage.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Webmail was terrible back when every single click required a fetching a new
page load. Even on a reasonably fast DSL connection, JavaScript Gmail is
noticeably more snappy than HTML Gmail.

Pre-ajax online maps? Almost unusable. I certainly wouldn't want to return to
those days.

~~~
Endy
Yes, because you're asking a client for text and images downloaded from a
server to do things it was never intended to. When you start employing
torturous misuse, you're going to find the tool unsuited to the job. You can
use a pipe wrench as a makeshift hammer, but a sledgehammer can't tighten a
nut (more than once).

Use an email and newsreader for email. Use a full mapping suite to download
specialized map data. Don't force a web browser to shim into those niche jobs.

Old adage I learned with computers: Do One Thing, Well. That's what each
program should be. One thing.

------
sgt101
Pages are made of 30 sites, more. This is what makes the experience shit, and
Google are bang up responsible. The architecture of the web did not, and does
not, include this - the business model that is sustained by it exploits the
web, it does not support it.

------
reustle
> Your website seems slow, try speeding it up with AMP today!

~~~
pcora
I used to hate AMP with my guts. But to be honest, usually when I tried to
avoid or loaded the site instead of AMP, I get presented with a worse
experience in a bloated web-site, whereas when I click on the AMP version, it
loads immediately. So now I don't care anymore. But google is not my main
search engine, so I less very little of it.

------
markosaric
Third-party calls are one of the main reasons for slow loading sites. These
calls include loading Google Fonts, loading Google Analytics and loading
Google's DoubleClick advertising scripts. Remove these calls and scripts, and
websites get so much faster.

Edit to add some stats:

94% of sites include at least one third-party resource.

76% issue a request to an analytics domain.

Median page requests content from 9 unique third-party domains.

Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls.

[https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-
parties](https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties)

------
monkpit
I feel like this will get a lot of flak from HN users, but I think this will
overall be a benefit to the user experience on all browsers, not just chrome.

------
esotericn
I'm on a slow connection. This page took a good while to load.

100kB of JS, 100kB of fonts. The images get a pass.

There's jQuery in there. It's a blog post. wat?

Just send me the text.

------
Lammy
This page doesn't contain any body text unless I run their Javascript. Is that
supposed to be faster?

------
syphilis2
Maybe Mozilla can add something like this to Firefox, but for websites that
break when using adblockers.

------
forgotmypw3
The web is already pretty fast if you don't put too much stuff into your
webpages.

~~~
tpmx
️:)

Yeah, pretty much. If web sites would stop stuffing these giant js frameworks
pages + 3 trackers + 3 ad networks into all page we could be using like iPhone
4 now.

------
tarjei
I hope they roll out good monitoring tools for website owner for these
features - i.e not a tool to test your site but a tool to tell you what google
reports to it's users about the site. Otherwise you can be fooled by running
lighthouse against your local server and never see the "this site loads
slowly" message...

------
joaobeno
This is just another attack on the open & free internet. Why so? Since Google
defines per their own metrics fast vs slow, they will imprint that impression
upon the user, making an otherwise good willed user a starting bad impression
on your site.

As people pointed out, this will make AMP even more attractive, driving more
traffic away to Google...

Also, it may impact sites hosted on cheap far datacenters, like my user being
in Brazil, and my server being in Virginia. Suddenly, my site is considered
slow by Chrome, while my _rich_ competitor who hosts in São Paulo gets the
"fast" badge...

I think this kind of classification creates extra confusion and impact at no
tangible benefit to everyone that isn't Google.

------
fenwick67
Can someone explain the point of this for the user?

As a user, I already know if the page is loading slowly.

~~~
SquareWheel
You might not know why. Is it just a slow site, or is your connection failing
you?

------
ouid
You know, I've noticed that most things load just about instantly with ad
blockers.

------
basilisks
Blue checkmarks but for websites. A merit badge for playing by the biggest
boys’ rules.

------
RenRav
If it's just a simple display to the user saying "this website generally loads
slow, dont worry", I'm ok with that, I often wonder whether some sites are
just bloated or it's my internet connection.

------
graphememes
Who watches the watchmen?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Mozilla?

------
rhacker
Isn't this just going to reward the facebooks, amazons, etsys, pinterests and
all the other websites that stole the users attentions away from homegrown
sites... even more?

------
davidgerard
Ad blockers speed up the web quite a bit!

Pity about that for Chrome, hey.

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
There's a concern over pushing AMP & their ads. I totally get that, but so far
the recommendations that they link to aren't directly related to either:

    
    
       % curl https://web.dev/fast/ 2> /dev/null | grep -I amp
                   Terms &amp; Privacy
                 </a>, and code samples are licensed under the

------
millstone
How does Google know which sites “typically load slow for users?” Is this
collected via Chrome telemetry or is there another mechanism?

~~~
kaycebasques
[https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-
experien...](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experience-
report)

------
m712
So how does this work? Where does Chromium get the data for the websites which
load slow? Does this mean that websites which one visits get sent to Google
now? Or do they use the existing SafeBrowsing queries to also send page load
times? What are the implications of this for tracking?

------
geekybiz
I'm a Web Performance guy so moves such as these benefit my business. Despite
that - I dislike this heavy handedness by Google.

\- What speed metrics? \- How would they be gathered?

If Web Performance was so single dimensional to classify it in this way, it
would have been solved a lot better by now.

------
majortennis
I understand why using an anchor tag is not always technically correct, but I
don't see how wrapping something like an image in a button is the right thing
to do, for an onclick event.

------
Uninen
I’d appreciate if DuckDuckGo would implement this kind of speed badge to their
search results. Never going to assume Google would even consider it as they
sell the things that make sites slow in the first place.

~~~
dredmorbius
Rather than play offence, play defence.

Come up with a "privacy" or "non-tracking" badge.

Identify free-standing / independent / non-AMP sites.

Note simple and JS-free designs, or graceful degredation.

Well-formed page structures (microformats, HTML5), lack of obfuscated elements
(JS, CSS), accessibility.

An open and distributed Web index standard.

Pretty much all of these are generally useful, and disadvantageous to Google.

------
dpau
> We... hope to land on something that is practically achievable by all
> developers.

There are a LOT of people who have websites that depend upon software that
they don't directly control, best example might be Wordpress users with
plugins. I myself have built a number of hobby websites that I just don't have
time to figure out how to update based on Google's recommendations. For
example, according to PageSpeed I need to "Serve images in next-gen formats"
and I just don't have the ability to do that now (underlying image processing
libraries don't support it) without a serious time commitment.

So I'm worried that a lot of smaller sites that don't have the resources to
keep up with Google's requirements are going to get a "badge of shame"..

~~~
orf
> I just don't have time to figure out

[https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/](https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/)

Also Chrome doesn't collect or aggregate performance data for sites without a
decent amount of traffic. They are not going to label your hobby sites as slow
as there is not enough data to do so.
[https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#f...](https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#faq)

~~~
dpau
Yes, exactly, I don't have time to move tens of thousands of images to
Cloudflare, update the image upload code, change all of the links, etc.

I think you are also underestimating the number of hobby sites that are the
primary source of information for their niche and have decent traffic, many of
them running Wordpress with tons of horrible plugins. Yes, I know, not ideal.
But these people don't have many alternatives.

------
fouc
We need some proper anti-trust action here. Split chrome from google.

~~~
adamredwoods
We have to prove some sort of monopoly, but looking back at Microsoft Windows
and Internet Explorer should give some legal framework.

------
andai
Disable JavaScript in your browser. There, the web is much faster :)

------
swiley
I just had to reboot my work computer today because chrome practically wedged
it by pushing everything into swap (or whatever Microsoft calls it.)

The web gets a _lot_ faster when you dump JavaScript.

~~~
couchand
Or just dump Chrome...

------
social_quotient
It’s like we need some sort of indicator or progress visualization. Something
that will show the user were the page is in terms of loading and rendering.

------
auiya
How will this work in corporate environments with intentionally slow web
proxies (decrypting TLS traffic, etc)?

------
jayd16
Whats the point of colorizing the load bar? If I see the bar, don't I already
know its slow?

------
buboard
what i m seeing with these "safety badges", "lightning icons", "green thumbs
up" are attempts by google and apple to control the web the same way they
control their app gardens. i m hopeful that they can't though.

------
alimbada
Ironically, the linked web.dev/fast page took way too long to load for me.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
web.dev also seems pretty broken with Firefox's built-in tracking protection
enabled. Ho hum.

------
vijaybritto
Google does this while at the same time making a heavy framework like this
[https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13](https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=@angular/core@8.2.13)
. This is not fair. This is abuse of power.

------
mfer
Now would be a good time for alternative news aggregators.

------
jaimex2
This is great news for the anti-trust case.

------
dlcmh
Just use Safari or Firefox

------
vkizl
Reddit is going to earn this so fast lol

------
ycombonator
“ Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which
may include signals beyond just speed.“ My speculation is that they are
gearing towards web moderation. Tag sites that don’t agree with their world
view as “potentially harmful”. This could make an average chrome user
immediately balk at opening the site and reading the content.

Before you downvote my comment explain why the above scenario is not
plausible.

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Conlectus
Google search has defined itself by being the way people access the web, and
already has heavy antitrust pressure put on it but the EU for related reasons.
Extending that would go against their stated world view, and more importantly
raise even more regulatory concerns.

This situation differs from eg. YouTube because they do not themselves host
the content, and are not subject to copyright laws related to it.

Also: Google is made of human beings who have already protested against, for
example, censoring Google within China.

