The 8-second delay is there to punish users who block JavaScript that is loaded from Google's servers (with ad-blockers) but still have JavaScript enabled.
I think that's a bit unnecessarily tin-foil-hat. If they didn't put in the 8 second css rule it would just show blank for those users right? So adding that rule is making it work at all instead which doesn't sound like "there to punish them".
Why is there an eight second delay instead of, say, an 0.8 second delay? Or no delay at all?
I mean, if the goal is to make the page display only once it's fully loaded, and the point of amp is to make pages load quickly, eight seconds seems gratuitous. Even slow sites load within eight seconds.
(I don't deliberately use any Google products, so I'm completely unfamiliar with amp.)
Until the javascript has loaded (a single cacheable javascript file: https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js ), the browser can't lay out the resources on the page (images for example).
If the browser rendered the page before layout, it would likely look pretty bad. Then when the javascript arrived, the document would layout again moving elements around. This is typically referred to as the "Flash of Unstyled Content" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content) and is considered by some to be a negative user experience. Many web pages outside AMP take a similar approach to hiding the content until the layout has completed.
The 8 second CSS animation is only present as an "escape hatch" in case the javascript never loads. The specific value was chosen as a time that probably indicates the javascript will never load. Note that if javascript is disabled entirely, the page is rendered immediately via the <noscript> tag. There has been a discussion around changing the 8 second time to something shorter
( https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/22543 ), though it could probably be renewed.
The behavior you describe occurs if the useragent blocks the URL https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js which does not have anything to do with ads or analytics.
Certainly an ad blocker can be used to block any URL, but I don't know of any that block this one by default. If there are any, let me know and I'm happy to file issues to get that fixed!
If a user chooses to block this particular resource which the page needs to load, then the page still loads after 8s.
Similarly, if the site owner chooses, they can run the AMP Toolbox optimizer (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ampproject/toolbox-optimizer) which lays out the page server-side and removes this CSS flash for most documents. Some documents can't be laid out until the viewport size is known.
People who block JS by default but who don't want to completely turn off JavaScript encounter that 8-second delay. (I'm using "ad-blocker" loosely -- it refers to any kind of tool that blocks ads and tracking. On my computer, it's blocked at the hosts level in addition to an add-on.)
Some people don't want to load resources from Google's servers, and they shouldn't be punished for it. That JS file isn't needed for AMP pages to load. People don't need to load JS to read text and view images. I don't think there is any reasonable argument to have any users hit an 8-second delay.
Without the Javascript file, the images will not load. AMP loads images using a custom element <amp-img> which has performance benefits such as lazy loading of images until they are close to the visible viewport and guaranteeing a stable layout that will not cause the elements on the page to jump around. The downside is that until Javascript is loaded, these images are not available to the browser.
Not seeing images is better than not seeing the page at all. People who block content know that things sometimes don't load. There is no reason to block loading of the pages for 8 seconds.
You're probably not their target audience anyway (read ad money stream) so they don't really care if you have to wait on content or don't see it at all. Google et. al. just see you as a parasite on the system.
It seems like the AMP delay is there to punish people who block that JavaScript loading from Google's servers. I can't think of another reason why there would be an 8-second delay for any user of a technology that (dubiously) is supposed to be about speed.
I solve it with a browser extension that redirects AMP to HTML, but that solution might not last forever.
One problem is that Google wants AMP to replace HTML. I've already seen AMP pages in the Google search results (on desktop), and at least one large website so far appears to be built entirely in AMP.[1]
Google already sends desktop users to Wikipedia's mobile site from some of their listings, so I wouldn't be surprised if Google eventually starts to send desktop users to AMP pages. Google benefits when people visit AMP sites, because Google will be able to spoof the domains and serve the content themselves, giving them increased control over publishers.
[1] independent.co.uk, but they removed the CSS that delays page loading.
there's a good reason for that because if you don't google can track you everywhere by IP, or at least have a reasonable guess that it's you or someone in your house.
The AmpProject is without question controlled by Google, so I reject your claim that it "does not have anything to do with ads or analytics".
The company is an advertising company. If 90+% of your revenue comes from one thing, that's what you are. Anything else is a gimmick.
That tech fanboys continue to ignore or refute this fact about Google just shows how much Kool aid they've consumed, I assume by skipping the drinking part and going straight to Kool Aid baths and Kool aid enemas.
Blocking third party resources on a site is not a "bug" that needs to be "fixed".
Easy solutions: don't store photos and other files in your Google account and/or download old mail by dragging it to a local folder in an email client like Thunderbird.
It would be nice if it were possible to not have it load Material Design by default. It's a bad idea in general for people to build their products with Google's visual branding. It basically paves the way for Google to become the entire platform.
That's much worse than I thought. The Web is not a Google or Apple product, and your product's design shouldn't change based on which browser you use. That entirely misses the point of the open WWW. It's a terrible idea to build things in that way.
That’s ridiculous. We have to make it look like _something_ the user would expect, and something good. Why not pick standard UI designs and patterns in use today? The alternative is that we build our own standards and force users to learn something new.
This is a feature of Ionic you’re free to disable but many users like very much. It is more widely used for apps running in the App Store that want to map to iOS and Android UI standards for each platform.
We also pride ourselves on making Ionic easily brandable so the platform standards provide a good base you can easily remix to make it look quite different.
The Web is open and independent. Google's and Apple's visual branding are not the standards of the Web. There are countless non-Google, non-Apple designs on the Web and they are not forcing users to learn anything new.
Sorry to disagree, but Material Design itself lacks aesthetic restraint and has accessibility problems with the constant flashing and animation, but that's another conversation.
Edit: I'm talking about the browser, not apps (though I don't like MD there either). I mean that websites shouldn't change their design based on the company that makes the web browser.
What if it hadn't been ionic, but was instead the browser itself that rendered the same website differently when in different OS? Oh wait...that's already the case...
Google's browsers don't automatically load your websites with Google's visual branding and Apple's browsers don't load your websites with Apple's visual branding.
There's a battle between some of the large tech companies for appification of the Web at the moment, and that way of thinking is a trap.
You do realize that Ionic is mainly used for App Store and Google Play right? You're free to not use it. It's a correct decision for Ionic to go with iOS and Android standards, from my point of view, and the implementation is superb as always with Ionic components.
A company shouldn't design its website with Google or Apple's visual branding as if it were locked into a closed platform. It also appears to be a problem with things like Flutter, though I haven't looked closely.
That’s stupid. Of course you can decide to force a specific theme via the config or even create a completely independent theme within Ionic - it has great tooling for that. However having an app behave like an iOS app when being opened in Safari on iOS absolutely makes sense. After all, Ionic is a mobile web framework and one of its goals is to look native on the specific platform.
Yes, but in this case you aren't really developing for the web, you're developing a "native" looking app that happens to use a WebView to display it. Using native looking controls therefore makes sense for this use case. There is a reason why Apple and Google provide UI widgets for use in applications, so that user have a consistent experience across apps.
The open Web is independent of the browsing device. If you play Google's game of using their visual branding, you're making it easier for them to hijack the WWW into a Google product.
Having that as a default means that many people will implement it.
Pretending that you speak for “the open web” in an attempt to sell some obsolete web design dogma that open web advocates have spent the last dozen years or so fighting against is pretty solid evidence that you’ve also missed the point of the open web.
I've organized about 500 events through that site. Charging attendees is a terrible idea that will kill Meetup.com and damage communities around the world in the process.
It looks like DNT is turned on automatically if tracking protection is on, so it probably doesn't identify you any more than "a Firefox browser with tracking protection on".
I just tested. With standard settings for "Content Blocking" (under "Privacy and Security") and "Only when Firefox is set to block known trackers" selected, Firefox does not send the DNT header in regular windows. It only sends it in private windows. Therefore if you don't want to stand out, you should not enable DNT.
Indeed. If you don’t want to stand out, you should use the defaults. Anything non-default will stick out as a 1%-or-less marker. Three or more non-default might well uniquely fingerprint you.
By that reasoning, what would be best would be to identify a few items of information exposed that are commonly used for tracking but that have little or no effect on browsing, and randomly alternate them between the default value and 1 or more other (or random) values.
If the data can't be relied on to contain any specific useful information (even whether it's default or not), then it's effectively useless for tracking, and you've not just hidden yourself in the largest category for those bits of tracking data, you've effectively made them entirely useless for tracking you (which is more effective than hiding in the biggest group).
That only works if you're synchronizing those changes with your other identifiers (cookies, local storage, ip, etc.) Otherwise you're going to be "that guy" that constantly changes his values with every page load.
Just based on a random seed set when the browser loads and the domain name being loaded (that is, external resource requests get the values for the sourcing page domain, which is already tracked in browsers for security purposes). You'll get persistent per-domain values per browser run. If they can already track you definitively beyond that (bookie, session, etc), you're not hurting yourself at all by doing it, but it will possibly help with all the other cases.
IIRC you should look into the Tor Browser’s work along these lines. It includes fun things like “provide a default untraceable screen size ignoring your own”, so that web pages render at the wrong resolution for your browser window in exchange for one less effective vector. I don’t know if Firefox has it under a config option or not.
I think you're talking about letterboxing, which Mozilla stole as a good idea from Tor a while back, and is gated behind the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" config option. It was covered here at the time.[1]
I figured someone might interpret that the wrong way. In my mind it was sort of a "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" mixed with "Good artists copy; great artists steal." I tried to allude to this with the "as a good idea" bit, so maybe it would come across as "that's a good idea, I'm stealing it!"
To summarize and clarify, I applaud their actions wholeheartedly. :)
URLs are also getting to be a problem. Browsers started to trim URLs, and it's resulting in web developers who are very savvy with computers who don't really understand how URLs work or that there is always a trailing slash on the root of a website and what it means.
Google is in the process of making it worse by hiding URLs in the search results. (It's also a security risk. Google's site-name detection often makes terrible mistakes and points users to malware.)
Snapchat? Instagram? Say what you will about these closed networks but they're a non-starter if you don't have them. It's why Huawei is doomed to utter failure in US/EU.
I was replying to the part about whether "you could actually use this as a main phone quite easily."
Some users might "need" Snapchat and Instagram (if we really stretch the meaning of "need"), but not 99% of them. A person who is willing to use old phones is probably more likely to not use those apps. I'm sure that many people wouldn't use them if it made their old phones work better. People who want those other kinds of entertainment apps can still spend money on new phones if they want.
"Popular electric brain stimulation method used to boost brainpower is detrimental to IQ scores"
> Using a weak electric current in an attempt to boost brainpower or treat conditions has become popular among scientists and do-it-yourselfers, but a new study shows that using the most common form of electric brain stimulation had a statistically significant detrimental effect on IQ scores.
