At first glance, this seems really cool. Then I remember it's Google we're talking about here. Somehow I feel like this is something they can use to benefit their search engine and/or AMP-style efforts. Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere. Also seems like potential phishing problems could arise. Can someone explain to me how this portal element to actually great and not just great for Google?
>Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere
But that seems to be exactly what it does: look at the image at the top of the article, the address bar clearly changes to the portal-target's location. I think that's what they mean by "can be navigated into".
Right but rather than making a seamless transition between pages they made it a subpage of the parent.
Having built-in page previews is actually a useful feature but without the other useful feature of
"play video" -> "click video to open page" -> "video continues playing while the rest of the real page renders around it" -> "you are now really on the other page with no connection to the previous page"
it seems like the business motivation for this was to embed more content in Google Search while keeping Google branding in the background.
This. It can allow you to see the google results and navigate from them seamlessly without actually leaving the top-level domain. It effectively captures the entire audience. There will be no more Internet, it's going to be a Google portal (like AOL) with Google keywords, and will "borrow" the content from everybody else.
How do you define "actually leaving"? Because after navigating to the portal, it occupies the whole viewport and becomes the main document with your site's URL.
Even if we assume you use AMP, package it with signed exchange, and Google SERP displays it then, yeah, your site could appear with no extra network request to your site. The lack of network requests isn't that different to old school HTTP proxies but with better specs and security. AMP has analytics and stuff so if you want to count visits, go do that.
I think the problem these technologies are meant to solve is making navigating between pages take under a hundred milliseconds and appear much faster by being able to preview/animate them. That would be good.
Yeah, new technology is not without cost and risks but Google turning the web into a walled garden isn't high on my list of risks.
It took me a few months to realize that when I browse google with my iPhone and click a link, it's not actually taking me to that site, just loading it in an iframe. Weird and unnecessary, except in the eyes of Google's margins.
The scrolling issues were due to a Safari bug. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow its users to install non-buggy browsers on their devices. I hate Apple devices with a passion.
