Google Chrome To Begin Marking Sites That Are Slow / Fast

[grigi]

Ugh, This sounds like another great ANTI-FEATURE :-(
I already can't use Google search because they present ads as search results.

And GCP is not a great platform. I have learnt to loathe it.

[xorbe]

Literally all the big names (ISPs, banks, utilities, etc) are going to get tagged as slow. They are all awful lol.

[arQon]

"Be fast, implement Google Amp! Use ads from our whitelist of ad purveyors to ensure fast load time and ad revenue.
Host your site on the Google CDN for the best performance."

I'm pretty sure none of the above has passed through the heads of Google management.

Yeah, no kidding. My "favorite" was when every time YouTube was slow - sometimes because my conn was genuinely flaking out in a storm, but usually just because it somehow magically "needed" to buffer halfway through a video - Google's *immediate* "diagnostic" popup was "Switch to Chrome!".
Not "Lower the stream resolution" or "Don't use the 60FPS stream we automatically chose for you", just "Switch to Chrome", because obviously it could only POSSIBLY be the browser that's to blame.
And yeah, sure, I use Firefox and I'm well aware that Google has deliberately, repeatedly, sabotaged YouTube for both that and IE / Edge. But you'd think it would at least CONSIDER something other than the browser as the potential cause of playback issues... :P

I'm not QUITE so cynical as to imagine that the same site that knows I'm not using their spyware browser stalled the stream just because of the UserAgent string. But honestly, these days I wouldn't be SURPRISED to discover that it did, which is a pretty sad state of affairs for a company that really did generally adhere to "Don't Be Evil" before the MBA asstards took over.

[M@yeulC]

This is a very bad decision by Google!
It is a form of discrimination.

Furthermore, websites that have ads take so long to load anyway because even their very own ad servers just are so overloaded...

Yes, most of the load time comes from ads. Phoronix takes less than 1 second to load without the ads, and up to over a minute with the ads.

AFAIK, this is about server response time, so don't worry, the page can take all the time it wants to load its ads

[bachchain]

Furthermore, websites that have ads take so long to load anyway because even their very own ad servers just are so overloaded...

That's supposed to make it okay?

[Unklejoe]

What’s the point of this? Wouldn’t it be obvious if a site is slow by the mere fact that it’s...slow?

[Ipkh]

Sites would load much quicker if the ad spots didn't keep changing. A static ad is fine, but lately the damn thing loads 1 ad for a few seconds and loads a different ad. So in essence the page never fully loads. And to think it's all Google's fault in the first place for selling ads on auction and starting this downward trend.

Way to solve your self created problem Google.

[Ipkh]

Oh, and thanks for killing the pay to remove google ads program. It was awesome for a while seeing kittens instead of banner ads.

[tildearrow]

Oh, and thanks for killing the pay to remove google ads program. It was awesome for a while seeing kittens instead of banner ads.

I never thought this existed?

[Ironmask]

How is this going to do anything other than shame other people for living in Europe? Literally what is the point other than to tell people their ping is bad by no fault of their own? Maybe it's to sell Google Cloud or something. This is pretty disgusting, then again so is Google.