What about the flow on impact this has for SEO though. Older content is MUCH harder to find because the web service supporting it doesn't support some new standard from Google and we lose access to a lot of niche sites.

Then we also have the challenge that it's harder to crawl and rank new content en masse...

Hard to say for sure of this is overall a net positive if you look across a range of different metrics, it's probably never been more debatable about whether Google knows best.

Core Web Vitals aren’t a standard that sites need to adopt, in the sense you seem to mean. They’re a set of (mostly performance) metrics which quantify specific aspects of a website each with some presumed impact on user experience.

Older content doesn’t need any particular action taken to be measured on these metrics, and in many cases may actually perform rather well (based on certain assumptions about said older content).

That Google may (and often does) rank older content poorly is definitely a concern in its own right, but it’s probably not a concern relevant to CWV.

Yes, agreed. I'm kinda conflating the two things. This issue isn't so much 'adoption' of something like core web vitals, but just the fact that doing well on these standards impact ranking (and therefore older content ranks poorly).

I wonder how many years would be saved by removing Google ads, Google analytics, Google recaptcha, etc.

It's nice to see the emphasis on performance. Google didn't have to do that, but they did. Even though I'm sure this will indirectly contribute to Google's revenue, it seems to me that the web users are the direct winners here. The web Vitals metrics seem reasonable as well.

Ironically, adding gtag.js/Google analytics to a website brings the speed score down significantly in my experience.

If websites are faster, it takes less time/resource for them to crawl the internet.

"How Google Tag Manager added back 100K years of waiting for web pages to load and further set the planet on fire"

"Look at the good we can do when we wield our monopoly." isn't really the brag that Google seems to think it is.

In this article, Google pretends to prioritize user convenience while running an ads business, trying to hide that they're ads as much as possible, and even getting their users infected with spyware.

"Our CWV product team is underperforming on our projections. Let's write a FOMO puff piece on this to generate more interest in target product teams."

I bet this is less time than my uBlock Origin rules have saved me. <_<

SponsorBlock has used crowdsourced timestamps to save users more than 2k years of viewing sponsors and other segments in YouTube videos [1].

[1]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

and probably has like a 2% market penetration

there's just a seriously large amount of those ads

doing God's work

How many years have users lost because of unskippable ads?

In the 90s I had to wait for every webpage to load, every time.

In the early 00s, it got a little faster, but still, a lot of waiting.

Yet, somehow, the web was a much more pleasant experience.

To be fair, 2000s had flash, full page reloads and IE, which I didn’t enjoy.

No objection about early 2010s though — less flash, just enough ajax, firefox usage at an all time high at ~30%, and higher than chrome.

Coincidentally in 2015 Google removed “don’t be evil” from their motto[1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

Maybe adding 20k lines of JavaScript to every page just to hide page refreshes wasn't such a great idea?

The users expect it! Superior developer experience! Don't question the dogma!

You can visit old pages/forums with today connection speed. No visible loading, no cookie banner. The website just load instantly, almost as fast as the default page, especially with an ad blocker. It never fail to put a smile on my face.

I too miss the days of the WWW being document oriented.

This page does not work with iOS Firefox Focus.

Only logo is loaded.

That's a feature!