3 ms·

> how much faster is it than ad-blocked webpages? Poke at it out yourself to get a feel for the answer. Find any recent article on any site of one of these pub

> how much faster is it than ad-blocked webpages? Poke at it out yourself to get a feel for the answer. Find any recent article on any site of one of these publishers that have enabled AMP pages. You can find a list on https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ or any AMP-enabled site you find. Once you've found an article/web page, view source. Look for a line in the html that reads: <link rel="amphtml" href="AMP URL HERE"> If you don't find that tag, the article is not AMP enabled, so find another article that is. Now, grab the URL at that href attribute and compare it to the original non-AMP URL you started at. Turn on/off ad-blockers, use a cold cache / hot cache, have fun. Don't forget that this comparison is not including the additional speedup gained from using the AMP Project (Google's) CDN.

JoshMnem 11y ago
I wouldn't consider that a benefit, since I don't want every site I visit to ping Google's servers. I haven't researched it in depth, but it seems like an attempt to appify the Web even more and bring it under Google's control. A "webpage" just becomes a brief side trip from the Google homepage, with a giant back button to send your traffic back to Google rather than deeper into your site. The fox (any single, large company with an interest in replacing the WWW with itself) should not be guarding the henhouse (the WWW). I mean that in reference to Chrome, appification, and things like AMP. It isn't good for publishers or for the future of the open Web. It seems absurd for sites to put code on their pages that adds a giant "go back to Google.com" banner on top of their pages, if that's what it does.
- gregable 11y ago
  The <link> tag is similar in browsers to a meta tag, it doesn't cause browsers to take any behavior, so this doesn't cause a ping to any server. The AMP HTML version of a page does require a javascript src to make these transformations, but that's cached, so you aren't going to send a ping to request it on every page load. The AMP version of a page doesn't add any banner or other visual style, the author has full control there. Here's an example, just pulled at random: Original: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-gettin... HTML Mobile: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-get... AMP: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.amp.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-get...
  - JoshMnem 11y ago
    I thought a link tag sends a request to get the contents of the href attribute, and then the server sends back the file or a 304 header, if it's cached. That seems to indicate that the server is getting a request from the browser. Also, isn't Google caching AMP pages on their own domains? I've read that Google doesn't send people to your site, but just to a copy on their own site. When I try the demo for the NY Times, I see a banner there that takes me back to the search results. Did NY Times decide that they want to use that above-the-fold real estate to send people back to Google.com? What specific code enables or disables this giant back button on an AMP webpage: http://imgur.com/GpBqgnx http://imgur.com/GpBqgnx AMP is a somewhat-forced restriction on what people can publish on their sites. Providing guidelines on how to make mobile pages faster would be a more reasonable solution. One could argue that no one is "forced" to use AMP, but if AMP pages appear at the top of the SERPs then that is a form of coercion, since fewer people will scroll beneath the fold.

JoshMnem 11y ago

I wouldn't consider that a benefit, since I don't want every site I visit to ping Google's servers. I haven't researched it in depth, but it seems like an attempt to appify the Web even more and bring it under Google's control. A "webpage" just becomes a brief side trip from the Google homepage, with a giant back button to send your traffic back to Google rather than deeper into your site. The fox (any single, large company with an interest in replacing the WWW with itself) should not be guarding the henhouse (the WWW). I mean that in reference to Chrome, appification, and things like AMP. It isn't good for publishers or for the future of the open Web. It seems absurd for sites to put code on their pages that adds a giant "go back to Google.com" banner on top of their pages, if that's what it does.

gregable 11y ago
The <link> tag is similar in browsers to a meta tag, it doesn't cause browsers to take any behavior, so this doesn't cause a ping to any server. The AMP HTML version of a page does require a javascript src to make these transformations, but that's cached, so you aren't going to send a ping to request it on every page load. The AMP version of a page doesn't add any banner or other visual style, the author has full control there. Here's an example, just pulled at random: Original: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-gettin... HTML Mobile: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-get... AMP: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-getting-another-theater-its-41st.amp.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/theater/broadway-is-get...
- JoshMnem 11y ago
  I thought a link tag sends a request to get the contents of the href attribute, and then the server sends back the file or a 304 header, if it's cached. That seems to indicate that the server is getting a request from the browser. Also, isn't Google caching AMP pages on their own domains? I've read that Google doesn't send people to your site, but just to a copy on their own site. When I try the demo for the NY Times, I see a banner there that takes me back to the search results. Did NY Times decide that they want to use that above-the-fold real estate to send people back to Google.com? What specific code enables or disables this giant back button on an AMP webpage: http://imgur.com/GpBqgnx http://imgur.com/GpBqgnx AMP is a somewhat-forced restriction on what people can publish on their sites. Providing guidelines on how to make mobile pages faster would be a more reasonable solution. One could argue that no one is "forced" to use AMP, but if AMP pages appear at the top of the SERPs then that is a form of coercion, since fewer people will scroll beneath the fold.