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There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat ha

There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G. If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.

bryanrasmussen 10y ago
well then they could have announced that they were going to aggressively penalize sites that were too bloated and SEO would take of the rest.
monochromatic 10y ago
If the issue were really about page speed, google could penalize the rankings of slow sites. No need to shovel a broken, self-hosted version of the site onto me.
greenspot 10y ago
> 5 different JavaScript frameworks This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.
- makmanalp 10y ago
  Would this theoretically be solved by some HTTP 2 stuff?
- tiffanyh 10y ago
  >> "This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all." Hasn't Facebook proven this to be incorrect. Facebook mobile app was originally just HTML5 & JavaScript. The experience was so slow, they ditched it and instead built a native iOS & Android app. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/
  - manmal 10y ago
    Two more reasons why this comparison is not on point: - On iOS, the FB App had to make do with a really slow JS engine at the time. IIRC Safari's JS performance was x5 compared to JS performance in apps' web views? This has more to do with how iOS treats apps, rather than how fast web pages in Safari are or were. - The FB apps were okayish at the time, given that they were web based. If you manage to get your web app to that level, your site is ok. Now add to that the performance gains and browser optimizations of the last 4 years and you get a system that flies. Native apps are still faster and respond quicker to touch, but you cannot hold that against JS web apps.
  - flukus 10y ago
    No, fastlite and a dozen other facebook apps have proven this incorrect. The official facebook app is slower, more bloated and battery draining than the mobile version ever was.
  - objclxt 10y ago
    That article is four years old. Facebook's app architecture has changed significantly since then, as has the speed at which JS can execute.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    That article's no longer relevant, and in any case the existence of a bad implementation does not mean that a good implementation is not possible.
pmlnr 10y ago
It's not Google's responsibility to fix the bloat. If something is painful, let it be painful; when they start losing visitors, they'll see something is off. This is _not_ a solution and google should not be doing anything with this.
fragmede 10y ago
You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain. No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them? Now, I'm visiting https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2F/poltics.. https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne.... in order to get content from NBC News, while http://www.nbcnews.com http://www.nbcnews.com works just fine. The writers of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in "site:www.nbcnews.com article name". I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract that AMP breaks. Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which "rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same thing to news publishers.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Why do you need to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com ?
  - djeikyb 10y ago
    So I can share a real link. Remove google's huge amp toolbar. Scroll normally. Have a correctly rendered page. Because I want content from the source, not google.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      That seems an arbitrary desire based on an older-model of web surfing that still gets around a site by physically selecting and deleting pieces of the URL. Lots of users don't operate that way. Caring about the URL is increasingly going in the direction of caring about the IP address. I can share the link by tapping the "Share" option on the dropdown menu in my phone's browser. Works great.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
Sure, but Google can offer tooling and best practices to push people in a certain way, like they do with everything. The best way to encourage people to move to new technology on their own is to change the search algorithms to provide positive incentives to implement those changes. Look at SSL. A lot of people don't care about encryption, but they care about SEO improvements more. Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.
- tracker1 10y ago
  They could easily heavily penalize any website delivering over 1mb of html + css + js, and have a bonus for being under 500/100/50kb total as part of their pagerank. That would be a huge driver... if nobody with over 1mb of html+css+js would be in the top 5 results, period.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    What you've described would be a pretty game-able SEO algorithm.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      So is every Google's guideline, yet most fail to game them. Google is smart. And good people will follow the guidelines instead of testing if something can be gamed, majority of industry is afraid of Google and its guidelines.
djrogers 10y ago
If google thinks page bloat and loading speed are a problem, they could have come up with a set of recommendations (likely most of the ones in AMP) and use PageRank to promote websites that adhere to those standards. Instead, they created a way to hijack the mobile web and become the de facto content presenter for any publisher who doesn't want to be punished by Google.
- tiffanyh 10y ago
  In case your not aware, since 2010 Google has in fact PageRanked higher faster web sites. https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear...
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    Which is exactly the point. Use it as a stronger signal and case closed. Web will change the way they want. Always. Right now they want to change it to their walled garden.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      If they've been using it for six years, and it hasn't improved things, what makes you think using it as a stronger signal will (a) actually improve things, (b) not make it trivial to game SEO?
      - angry-hacker 10y ago
        a) It would improve things because website owners, seo's or whatever you want to call them, always listen everything Google says. I'm in the industry. One tweet from Matt Cutts and they are already changing the brand name if Matt tells them so. That is the way industry works. Everyone knows site speed is a weak signal. Google could impose harsh penalties but they don't. b) Google has become really smart nowadays. You could theoretically game everything in this world. They execute the javascript and run the page, they already know how to detect banners, interstatials etc. They also have manual team giving out bans.
tboyd47 10y ago
Anecdotally, client-side bloat is mostly going to be ad tech -- not React & company. Since Google and Facebook have such a tight grip over ad tech these days, maybe a better fix than AMP would be encouraging server-side, rather than client-side, ad delivery. Edit: In a way, AMP feels like a scheme by Google to force content providers to enforce the solution to a problem that Google created. They're trying to speed up the web with their right hand while slowing it down with their left.

bryanrasmussen 10y ago

well then they could have announced that they were going to aggressively penalize sites that were too bloated and SEO would take of the rest.

monochromatic 10y ago

If the issue were really about page speed, google could penalize the rankings of slow sites. No need to shovel a broken, self-hosted version of the site onto me.

greenspot 10y ago

> 5 different JavaScript frameworks This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.

makmanalp 10y ago
Would this theoretically be solved by some HTTP 2 stuff?
tiffanyh 10y ago
>> "This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all." Hasn't Facebook proven this to be incorrect. Facebook mobile app was originally just HTML5 & JavaScript. The experience was so slow, they ditched it and instead built a native iOS & Android app. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/
- manmal 10y ago
  Two more reasons why this comparison is not on point: - On iOS, the FB App had to make do with a really slow JS engine at the time. IIRC Safari's JS performance was x5 compared to JS performance in apps' web views? This has more to do with how iOS treats apps, rather than how fast web pages in Safari are or were. - The FB apps were okayish at the time, given that they were web based. If you manage to get your web app to that level, your site is ok. Now add to that the performance gains and browser optimizations of the last 4 years and you get a system that flies. Native apps are still faster and respond quicker to touch, but you cannot hold that against JS web apps.
- flukus 10y ago
  No, fastlite and a dozen other facebook apps have proven this incorrect. The official facebook app is slower, more bloated and battery draining than the mobile version ever was.
- objclxt 10y ago
  That article is four years old. Facebook's app architecture has changed significantly since then, as has the speed at which JS can execute.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  That article's no longer relevant, and in any case the existence of a bad implementation does not mean that a good implementation is not possible.

pmlnr 10y ago

It's not Google's responsibility to fix the bloat. If something is painful, let it be painful; when they start losing visitors, they'll see something is off. This is _not_ a solution and google should not be doing anything with this.

fragmede 10y ago

You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain. No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them? Now, I'm visiting https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2F/poltics.. https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne.... in order to get content from NBC News, while http://www.nbcnews.com http://www.nbcnews.com works just fine. The writers of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in "site:www.nbcnews.com article name". I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract that AMP breaks. Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which "rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same thing to news publishers.

fixermark 10y ago
Why do you need to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com ?
- djeikyb 10y ago
  So I can share a real link. Remove google's huge amp toolbar. Scroll normally. Have a correctly rendered page. Because I want content from the source, not google.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    That seems an arbitrary desire based on an older-model of web surfing that still gets around a site by physically selecting and deleting pieces of the URL. Lots of users don't operate that way. Caring about the URL is increasingly going in the direction of caring about the IP address. I can share the link by tapping the "Share" option on the dropdown menu in my phone's browser. Works great.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago

Sure, but Google can offer tooling and best practices to push people in a certain way, like they do with everything. The best way to encourage people to move to new technology on their own is to change the search algorithms to provide positive incentives to implement those changes. Look at SSL. A lot of people don't care about encryption, but they care about SEO improvements more. Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.

tracker1 10y ago
They could easily heavily penalize any website delivering over 1mb of html + css + js, and have a bonus for being under 500/100/50kb total as part of their pagerank. That would be a huge driver... if nobody with over 1mb of html+css+js would be in the top 5 results, period.
- fixermark 10y ago
  What you've described would be a pretty game-able SEO algorithm.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    So is every Google's guideline, yet most fail to game them. Google is smart. And good people will follow the guidelines instead of testing if something can be gamed, majority of industry is afraid of Google and its guidelines.

djrogers 10y ago

If google thinks page bloat and loading speed are a problem, they could have come up with a set of recommendations (likely most of the ones in AMP) and use PageRank to promote websites that adhere to those standards. Instead, they created a way to hijack the mobile web and become the de facto content presenter for any publisher who doesn't want to be punished by Google.

tiffanyh 10y ago
In case your not aware, since 2010 Google has in fact PageRanked higher faster web sites. https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear...
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Which is exactly the point. Use it as a stronger signal and case closed. Web will change the way they want. Always. Right now they want to change it to their walled garden.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    If they've been using it for six years, and it hasn't improved things, what makes you think using it as a stronger signal will (a) actually improve things, (b) not make it trivial to game SEO?
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      a) It would improve things because website owners, seo's or whatever you want to call them, always listen everything Google says. I'm in the industry. One tweet from Matt Cutts and they are already changing the brand name if Matt tells them so. That is the way industry works. Everyone knows site speed is a weak signal. Google could impose harsh penalties but they don't. b) Google has become really smart nowadays. You could theoretically game everything in this world. They execute the javascript and run the page, they already know how to detect banners, interstatials etc. They also have manual team giving out bans.

tboyd47 10y ago

Anecdotally, client-side bloat is mostly going to be ad tech -- not React & company. Since Google and Facebook have such a tight grip over ad tech these days, maybe a better fix than AMP would be encouraging server-side, rather than client-side, ad delivery. Edit: In a way, AMP feels like a scheme by Google to force content providers to enforce the solution to a problem that Google created. They're trying to speed up the web with their right hand while slowing it down with their left.