Pretty ironic that Google--a company that gained notoriety for its minimalist search engine--has a "company blog" full of ridiculous eye candy. On my laptop screen, the top bar (which stays as you scroll down) takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Then I accidentally moused over the bottom part of the page as I was reading the end of the article, triggering yet another bar popping up from the bottom and telling me about other Google sites.
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.
It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected Google, of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.
"The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse."
You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)
The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it anyway.
Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current employee reading this will pass it along.
Most Google pages do load in much less than 500ms - of course, the trick here is what you have in mind by "load". The actual slow renders are all on browser (read, javascript) side: mobile clients, etc.
As far as best practices, I agree we need to do a better job of advertising this material. It is available:
Google's brand is about fun, not minimalism. You can look at the page and see a pretty standard corporate blog post. But, if you choose to, you can play with the header. It's fun. Try it.
(Actually, the design is pretty minimal. Big block of text that fits on the page without scrolling, and a few pieces of miscellaneous info on the right hand side. There, but not distracting. I can't really complain about the aesthetics of this design.
If you asked a million people what Google was about, if as many as a hundred of them put "fun" ahead of speed and usefulness, I would be very surprised.
This isn't Google Search, it's the Google corporate blog. It's an ad, essentially. Google wants people to associate the brand with fun.
Balls that bounce around is not exactly the end of the world. Yes, you don't like it. Some other people apparently do. You read the article and discussed it anyway :)
Yeah, I don't understand why Blogger now requires javascript to read any blog. The content is just static HTML most of the time! Why are they pushing so hard to hide the content if you have javascript disabled?
They are making their properties require scripting, they threatened that javascript "would be replaced" with something that can support massive codebases (dart), and they have new protocols that use a persistent connection that can't really have a proxy between you and Google (Spdy).
I'm sure some of these came about organically, but they all contribute to moving from a publishing model (web 'pages') to an application model. Basically Google is making the web into an application, but like modern DRM in games, you have to be 'online' signed into google all the time to use it.
Make it personal 1:1 with google by killing proxies (require TLS like in Spdy), kill pages by requiring scripting. Result is a Ubisoft for the web. This is I think pretty clearly the destination that Google is pushing towards.
JavaScript is part of the web now. It's because people like interactive content, not because of some conspiracy to DRM their corporate advertising blog.
"JavaScript is part of the web now." It wasn't before? It's acceptable to have completely blank pages with no content, JavaScript 'or else'?
"It's because people like interactive content". And Google put '+' into everything because 'people like social', not some plan to compete with Facebook.
"some conspiracy to DRM their corporate advertising blog." Because clearly I was talking about a single blog.
"proxying works fine for SPDY" A SPDY -> HTTP proxy. When there's a SPDY-to-SPDY caching proxy and no man-in-the-middle you might say it works fine.
...that's a lot of spin from a Google employee. Maybe I hit pretty close to the mark.
You're right that it's odd that the page is blank when viewed in w3m. I'm guessing this is an oversight rather than something intentional. I will investigate.
(As for SPDY proxies, I use one every day at work. I'm not sure why you are so concerned about the ability to proxy, but I assure you it works fine.)
Since Marissa left UX, G's frontend becomes worse every day. I especially hate these "fixed bars" that pollute my small netbook screen and that unfortunately are so hip nowadays, like flash intros were ten years ago, or the rainbow <hr> some 15 years ago. Hope they don't exist for long, its terrible UX.
As for a blog software where you need JS to read a simple text, well... facepalm.
My internet connection is pretty bad. The thing is, whole country is in the same shit. Guess what, google plus doesn't even load in here. I mean, facebook(even through proxy since its blocked by govt) and others are loading perfectly, maybe with some delay, but g+ is not functioning at all. All google services are suffocating with js/ajax/whothehellknowwhat stuff, that making it almost impossible to use them if you are not at some lightning speed connection. Uhh, so pissed off!
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.
It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected Google, of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.