10 ms·

Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

423 points by danielrm26 10y ago

thecourier 10y ago
I have been suffering with AMP. try to share a link to an article and you current url is an AMP url. if the site didn't make a hard link in the post title, you are gonna have a bad time.
ariwilson 10y ago
The reaction to AMP is a perfect example of when the things users/publishers care about differ greatly from developers. Users don't care about being on the publisher's site vs. Google's but do really care that that their low-to-medium end phone from 2014 can load the article in <5 seconds on a slow 3G connection. Publishers care that all of their tracking and ads are working properly.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Strangely I don't see any amp pages if I search within the Google app in Android but see them if search from Chrome. Does anyone know why is this difference? How can I restore amp pages while searching from Google app?
ptasci67 10y ago
I don't think this post really articulated any concrete reasons why AMP is good or bad. It just said it is.
- ksk 10y ago
  I saw several. 1. Single point of failure/control 2. It's a retraction from the web's inherent uhhh 'webby' nature where you can link to any content. 3. Google wants to become a 'toll booth' on the internet where it inserts itself between users and content. As an aside, I think people do sense a bit of hypocrisy from a lot of "benevolent" companies like Google. They're all open and standards-y when its about commoditizing a sector in which they don't have any direct financial interest. But they're fiercely closed and proprietary when it serves their interests.
- FlorianRappl 10y ago
  Well, that is not true. The author clearly stated that the problem with AMP is that it creates an artificial silo where all content is being distributed (i.e., in the hands of) Google. But I agree that more arguments (especially also listing the advantages of AMP) would have given the post more credibility.
kowdermeister 10y ago
If you share an AMP page it will indeed link to Google's CDN but if you click it it immediately redirects to the full article on desktop: http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png The full URL is still part of the shared link, so not much of a value has been lost, but the gain (speed boost) still outperforms this "inconvenience". I don't really feel the hatred against AMP, it works as intended and for me as an end user that's all that matters.
- jansenv 10y ago
  I really like AMP. As a web company, it reduces our hosting costs and is a cheater way to improve the rankings of our sites.
CJefferson 10y ago
Out of interest, is there anyone who wants to defend the current Google AMP (not the concept of lighter webpages, but how google has gone about it?) I haven't found anyone yet personally.
- sideproject 10y ago
  Just noticed a few days ago one of the major Australian newspapers started using AMP. I do understand the negativities around Google's AMP, but the speed was.. blazing fast. I can't help to think that for a user who may not be familiar with all the underlying issues, it is a pretty good user experience in terms of the speed alone.
  - xeromal 10y ago
    I seek out AMP pages on my phone everytime. It's exceedingly faster than a typical page like CNN.
  - Accacin 10y ago
    I'd image they've done that because they want to get on the news carousel,and only AMP sites appear in that. They're basically being forced to use it.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  As someone that dislikes viewing desktop sites on mobile devices I have no problems with AMP. It would seem the majority of people that have issues with it have to do with Google caching the content. If you don't like Google caching AMP content then host your own caching. It's free open source software.
  - geofft 10y ago
    This is software vs. services confusion. It's sort of like saying that if you don't like Reddit's moderation policies, host your own Reddit, it's free software. Also, most people who complain about AMP claim that no caching is needed, just adherence to the AMP format. But there's no way to go from a Google search results page, or a link provided to you by someone who uses Google for search, to an uncached page.
moomin 10y ago
And another thing: it breaks the iOS reader feature, so it's frankly worse than the full fat page.
- Isamu 10y ago
  Ugh, "mobile" pages that break the reader are worse than suck. I use the reader all day long to make the mobile web bearable.
- mikewhy 10y ago
  Reader is working fine here. Do you have an example where it's not?
  - moomin 10y ago
    You're right. Looks like it's been fixed at some point since I stopped clicking on AMP links.
steffenweber 10y ago
Google should reward fast / jank-free websites instead of rewarding websites that use one particular technology (AMP). On SERPs, both the "flash" icon and the AMP carousel are AMP-exclusive which suggests that Google is abusing its market power.
- Zikes 10y ago
  Bing also includes AMP in their search results: http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-t... AMP is a standard for creating fast / jank-free web sites, which all search engines can implement freely. Google is spearheading the effort because nobody else did, but they're not monopolizing it. Everyone is free to contribute.
  - prebrov 10y ago
    Afaik, AMP is solely driven and developed by Google engineers, both standard and implementation. Everyone is free to follow, but they don't accept contributions. That is monopolising.
    - cramforce 10y ago
      It is not true that AMP does not accept contributions. What is your data to back that up? Here is actual data: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors AMP currently has 275 contributors (people whose code was merged) on its open source project. Lets aim high and say 50 of them work for Google (probably a bit less), that leaves about 225 other contributors.
- xd1936 10y ago
  They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.
Zikes 10y ago
AMP specifications allow for other cache servers, of which CloudFlare[0] has recently implemented one. You could implement your own if you like. AMP also specifies that the canonical page URL should be used when sharing, though the cached URL is currently what's shown in the browser. Their last developer update[1] said they're working to address this, however for all relevant purposes Google's own systems already currently consider AMP traffic and results to be attributed to the original source. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-... [1] https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... > Google amends its cached AMP search results with Schema.org and OpenGraph metadata, so posting the link to any platform that honors these should result in the canonical URL being shared.
- kyrra 10y ago
  There is a decent amount of documentation about how the AMP cache works here: https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview
deleted 10y ago
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anigbrowl 10y ago
When i got a Nexus One way back when, it had a news app that preloaded the news with 4-8 paragraphs of plain text and a single photograph. It was great, I could catch up on the news while I was standing in a checkout line or similar short time-wasting situation. AMP gets somewhat back towards that, but it's still slow and unresponsive by comparison. Google doesn't get news. The people who work on google News clearly don't consume it, barring the unlikely possibility that they're masochists who enjoy making everyday tools work more and more poorly.
mynegation 10y ago
It got annoying enough for me to switch my search to bing.com everywhere, including Google's own browser. My two main complaints: 1. Once I am on AMP page, most of the time I want to click around the site and I cannot do that - feels like a cage. 2. URL obfuscates the site name and article title (not completely, but definitely adds visual noise)
- __jal 10y ago
  2a) I want to get to the site, not another Google property. Penalize my search listing all you like, but none of my stuff will be hosted elsewhere. I thought publishers learned their lessons here - use someone else's printing press, and ultimately, they control what's printed.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    This is the part that I don't understand. Why are publishers so eager to give away control of their meal-ticket?
    - wmf 10y ago
      They can always turn AMP off if Google does something evil.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        And lose their ranking? It won't be as simple as "just turn it off"
- sjcsjc 10y ago
  Agree. I did exactly this a couple of days ago when trying to get the URL of a BBC news article. I had never used bing before that.
- the_watcher 10y ago
  The lack of navigation within the AMP site is the reason I avoid clicking an AMP link if at all possible
davewasthere 10y ago
Similar to Medium, AMP encourages fast page loads and no interstitials, pop-ups or other cancer that seems to infest the average site these days. Yes, it may be possible to fix it over time. But I see AMP and Medium as clean, lightweight platforms that developers/marketers want to emulate and users will start to demand. From a user experience, you definitely can't beat the speed of AMP delivered content. So it's a high bar to beat. But if it forces content providers to up their game, I see it as a good thing. I guess the scary point, that hasn't explicitly been mentioned, is what happens when a good portion (maybe not a majority) of content is AMP-enabled. Is it something we transition away from, or is it here to stay? Will non-AMP, but fast pages be second-class citizens in the new AMP-era?
- stonogo 10y ago
  Nothing about Medium is lightweight. Consider this one-sentence article that results in a 1.2MB pageload: https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524 https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... There are more examples and a broader examination available from idlewords: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
  - djrogers 10y ago
    Lucky you - that medium link was a 2.19MB download on my laptop.
    - bartread 10y ago
      That's really strange. 760KB for me, but it was a good 3 - 4 seconds before everything had rendered. The article content was there much more quickly, but the recommendations and responses sections below took longer to appear. Crazy because when you look at Medium it does appear to be very clean so this experience has certainly been somewhat disillusioning.
mrfusion 10y ago
The other problem with amp is that it's really hard to share an artical. I was reading one on google news and I wanted to share it with you guys but I couldn't figure out how to get a URL for the story.
interfacesketch 10y ago
Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS? I feel that many web developers don't realise that simple HTML and CSS is often all you need to make clear, fast loading pages. No complicated tricks or techniques required. You can make the page reasonably pleasant in appearance too. Think of the sites you often visit: news stories, blogs, magazine-style sites, discussion sites. These are mostly text, not web apps. I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but I'd like to ask if readers find the web page links below fast to load on their mobile phones? They don't use AMP. I created the pages below as a test because I was (and still am) frustrated by the slow page-loading speeds when using my phone with a 3G connection. The page links below represent a common article/blog/report style of page. There's about 2500+ words on the page. The page content is CC licensed but the pictures from the original synopsis are not included despite the references in the text (since this was just a test) So is it fast? Version A: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html Here is an identical version to the above but one that loads custom fonts (approx 40kb extra). Is this slower? Version B: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html
- newsat13 10y ago
  > Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS? Can you suggest frameworks that help me do this automatically? Please no, raw html. I daresay that those would recommend developing without frameworks have no experience maintaining other people's projects.
  - Zikes 10y ago
    We need it like we needed "use strict" in JS, which is to say not really, but it really helps. I think of AMP as "HTML Strict", a means of enforcing the rules and practices necessary for faster web sites.
    - 10y ago
newsat13 10y ago
Just like we have made silos on the mobile market, the internet will slowly get it's own silos. For people to value decentralization, they need to be shown direct and observable value. Just taking a moral/ethical stand is not enough. This is the case with anything and not just technology. The cars and the phones we use probably enslave chinese and kill polar bears.. but for all what the general population cares those things don't exist/happen. This comes down to human nature.
ucaetano 10y ago
> The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself. It seems the author isn't familiar with how CDNs work, how they've been around for many years and how they serve most of the data on the internet. When you browse YT, the data most likely isn't being served by Google directly, but by a Google-provided rack on your local ISP. When you browse a newspaper website, it is most likely coming out of an Akamai or some other CDN's server in your local ISP. Akamai by itself serves about 30Tbps of local traffic around the world. And before these massive CDNs emerged, small ISPs would use caching solutions for static content (most of the web back then). So we've all been loading content from 3rd party servers for more than a decade, not from the website itself. The internet as it is today is only sustainable because of CDNs.
- ksk 10y ago
  IMHO, the quoted statement doesn't necessarily preclude CDNs. I think you're reading too much into the phrasing, which like you suggested, is a laypersons view of the internet. To me, it is instantly obvious what the author meant. The question is who controls the platform. For e.g. Are you in control if Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the future Google is free to show "suggested" content which is not your own, etc, etc.
  - ucaetano 10y ago
    > "Are you in control if Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the future Google is free to show "suggested" content which is not your own, etc, etc." Just don't use Google's CDN then, use someone else's, like Cloudflare or Bing.
dccoolgai 10y ago
I remember when Google had a really awesome thing that provided great content experiences: It was called Google Reader. I wish they would take some of the energy they are using trying to force AMP down everyone's throats and just re-launch Reader.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  And the beautiful thing is, RSS feeds load quickly with no scripts, embedded ads, or tracking, and isn't tied to any proprietary cloud service provider. More and more I am convinced Google convinces everyone to move away from things just so they can "reinvent" them down the line in a more proprietary fashion.
  - mikewhy 10y ago
    There totally are RSS feeds with ads and tracking.
    - patmcguire 10y ago
      Including Google Reader. You could put ads in the feed. If you really want to track people an image load is enough, too, although it's harder to plug third parties in.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      I mean, sure, you can put like... text ads in an RSS feed, and I'm sure you can throw a tracking link as a link to click on in there. But unless you click into the page from the RSS feed, you aren't going to be picking up any stray cookies or have any scripts running on your computer. Browsing an RSS reader is very fast, and has very little bloat.
meerita 10y ago
Just adblock and you will get a fast browsing experience. The biggest problem is not web development, but the advertising framework that is installed nowadays.
nachtigall 10y ago
AMP is about lock-in. I'll just leave this here: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-la...
jstewartmobile 10y ago
AMP has been a blatant power-play from square-one. It's nice to see it being called out on a site as prominent as Miessler's.
wffurr 10y ago
I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first result (probably personalized?). Had to go to the fourth result for something with AMP, from CIO.com. The page loaded instantly, was able to scroll without things jumping around, and the header link to the CIO.com homepage worked as expected. They were still able to serve ads and count my pageview too, even if I never directly contacted their server. I just don't get what the big deal is.
- mort96 10y ago
  I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.
  - mikewhy 10y ago
    The fact that the person receiving the link will also get a fast loading well behaved page with a bar at the top is not such a deal breaker for everyone.
  - asdfologist 10y ago
    I don't care and I doubt most users do. AMP has made my mobile browsing experience effectively much faster.
  - wffurr 10y ago
    Just for giggles, I hit "copy link" in the Chrome Webview that the Android Google Search App opened up. Pasted that into Android Chrome, and it took me straight the AMP page, which loaded instantly and let me scroll right away. Seems fine. I then went to my desktop, used the Chrome history feature to open the tab from my mobile, and the AMP URL redirected me to the publisher's desktop site, which took multiple seconds to load and then displayed an annoying interstitial. If anything, I'm frustrated that my desktop browser wouldn't open the AMP page and load and allow scrolling immediately with no interstitials. The "huge useless bar" at the top was the exact same in the AGSA Chrome Webview as the OP's non-AMP site. I don't know what you're on about. I didn't notice it because it's not there. I went and looked at the search results in Android Chrome (instead of the Google Search app), and there was an extra bar at the top that said "From cio.com" which disappeared as soon as I scrolled, which happened instantly because I was able to load and scroll instantly.
wenbert 10y ago
I feel sometimes the web is going in circles. A) First we had simple web pages B) Then people want to do fancy stuff on it. It became slower C) Back to A Instead of going back to "A", it seems like there new are ideas are coming out (like AMP) but in the end, I really wish we would just go back to "A". HTML is HTML.
- tdkl 10y ago
  The company who is selling you the B+ package (ads, tracking) now reinvented A to leave the same + "features" intact.
amiga-workbench 10y ago
AMP is exactly what our industry deserves for doing such an awful job in regards to performance for so long.
forgotAgain 10y ago
This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
brilliantcode 10y ago
While the article is correct that there's a big conflict of interest emerging in terms of privacy, it will be exactly like the reaction we've had to all other news of violations on the internet. We've got people with remote controlled submarines siphoning data from the pipes. Yet no outright revolt. People just aren't able to fathom the compromises without the technical framework that most HN'ers have to be able to catch these things in the app. I'm sure 16 years ago we argued that Google eating up search market would be bad for consumers. People gladly voted Google while ditching Yahoo, Altavista, and other search engines for Google. It will be the same case for AMP or PWAMPs (Progressive Web App + AMP), they are here to stay. So yes, while you can put a sticker with "AMP? Not in my backyard" on your laptop, but the vast majority of consumers simply don't care. We are all self serving bunch. Unless more is done other than writing articles and sharing, the status quo will be whatever the unchallenged decides it will be, with the money and resources to see to it. The rest of us can only vote with our money. The internet is not a democracy after all unless we have some type of mesh networking using our mobile phones, is coupled to governments and their willingness to keep the underweater fibre cables. Creating our own satellite mesh network is obviously out of the question as well.
27182818284 10y ago
There is a lot of hostility lately toward AMP it seems like. I personally really enjoy it and have found myself now choosing AMP articles over non-article because I know the mobile experience won't suck. One thing I noticed in the author's post: The author mentions that "The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself." I don't think that is correct unless you use choose to use the AMP-cache. For example, if you curl https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/23/donald-trump-first-orders-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp You get back the content such as "Nancy Pelosi, Democratic..."
matchu 10y ago
Be sure to read Paul Bakaus's response, "Why AMP caches exist", to hear both sides of the issue. https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/amp/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... (Though, actually, it's only a response in spirit; Bakaus's article was posted about a week earlier than Miessler's.) I think the problem with the AMP cache model is that, because you need to link directly to the cached URL, you commit to exactly one cache provider. If Bing were to also implement their own validated AMP cache for Bing search results, you can't have one link point to both; you're either AMPed in Google results or in Bing results, and, by being marginally bigger, Google wins all of the pie. That's no good. How might we change the AMP standard, or the trust model around AMP caches, to get the same performance wins while still enabling competition?
amelius 10y ago
Can't Google just penalize slower-than-necessary pages in their search results?
apeace 10y ago
The core argument of this article is flawed. AMP does not break normal links--although the Google search engine sort of does. As an example of using AMP with normal links, see Cloudflare's implementation[0]. It is possible for many CDN-like services to implement AMP caches. Web sites link to each other normally, and mobile visitors can be served the AMP version. Remember that AMP is an open standard and accepting pull requests[1]. > Who (other than Google) can possibly see this as a good thing? Users want faster pages. From all these AMP critics, I have never heard an alternate solution, or even an idea, of how we can streamline delivery of article content. AMP is imperfect. But it is a step in the right direction _for users_. Critics need to step up with a better idea, or maybe some code, and quit with the (in this case, unfounded) rhetoric. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ [1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml
- wmf 10y ago
  I can't wait for the "remove the AMP cache concept" pull request.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  here's the idea: give pages amp ratings purely based on full-load page-speed. amp pages get it, vanilla hackernews gets it too.
  - apeace 10y ago
    IIRC Google already does this. But it doesn't solve the same problem as AMP does. With your solution, site A can load at 2s and site B at 3s, and site A will win. With AMP, sites A and B can both load in 200ms by easily integrating with an open standard. Also: all this talk of "lock-in" and "centralization". With the approach you proposed, the publisher with the most money to spend on dev resources wins the highest search ranking. Isn't that counter to decentralization? Isn't an open, simple standard like AMP a better solution (though not a perfect one)? What I'd like to hear from an AMP critic is: how can we achieve what AMP achieves--lightning-fast speeds that users love--without the "evil" AMP approach?
throw2016 10y ago
This is probably the 5th article on amp in the last few days but its already a reality so it would perhaps have helped if this intense focus was put much earlier. A large number of mainstream sites are already on amp. The rest will inevitably be forced to follow. It's done. It's a clear abuse of power by Google which would ideally be illegal given its near monopoly search position. Trading convenience for a lock-in is an extremely poor tradeoff in the long run and its a miracle no legal action is in the offing. This is the negative outcome of capitalism, concentration of power which inevitably gets abused.
superkuh 10y ago
Cloudflare is doing this AMP crap too. If a cloudflare user enables AMP on his site then links from their domain to yours will trigger a visit of Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; +https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot) AppleWebKit/534.34" which then mirrors the content from your domain and re-hosts it on Cloudflare servers. Then whenever someone goes to the Cloudflare user's website and clicks a link to your website they'll instead be fed a version of the page from Cloudflare and you'll never see that traffic. And since you (or me, in this case) don't have a Cloudflare account you can't get any response from Cloudflare support to get them to stop re-hosting and serving your content from their servers.
- fivre 10y ago
  Requests from non-user accounts do still get responses, just not quickly. You may have more luck with Twitter.
- ej_campbell 10y ago
  Publisher's see AMP traffic since they are in control of ads and analytics used in amp page.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
inian 10y ago
We need tools to help developers build fast websites. If all websites were as fast as AMP and Instant Articles, these platforms would become obsolete. It is in our hands as developers to take back control and make the web as decentralised as possible.
IgorPartola 10y ago
It is one of the most annoying things to use, and might actually get me to switch my default search engine. I often search for stuff where the results come up on Reddit. I want to see the comments, but AMP helpfully hides all replies, and only shows like the top 5-10 comments. This is useless. So now instead of getting to the page I want right away, I have to scroll down to the button that says "see more comments". WTF?
- makecheck 10y ago
  If you use DuckDuckGo you can include "g!" in a search to Google it instead (except in a way that does not return AMP results).
mark_l_watson 10y ago
AMP is probably good for web users. However, I believe that AMP goes against the free and distributed spirit of the web. I am somewhat a Google fan, happily paying for music, tv shows, movies, and use the Google cloud platform. I also get some value from Facebook. That said, I think that Google and Facebook are going to eventually badly damage the web, or at least the web that I love.
PascLeRasc 10y ago
It doesn't seem like the author says why they think it's bad that Google stores articles on its own servers, just that everyone should know already. Not very convincing.
awqrre 10y ago
Google started stealing content a long time ago on their search page... sometime displaying almost whole pages of content as the first "search result" so that the user doesn't even need to visit the source.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  Does it count as stealing if websites opt into it?
  - tdkl 10y ago
    Some call it "SEO optimization" I call it extortion because they'll get better ranks and a "carousell".
manigandham 10y ago
AMP is a terrible idea. HTML is already very fast, if it's just kept lean and clean. Creating a new fork of HTML only means less resources for publishers to spend on their existing sites, creating an ever-increasing divergence in experience. Google already had a great way to enforce better performance by taking it into account for search rankings - which it already uses as we've seen just a few days ago to discourage popup modals. Another issue is that Google's adtech software is the most popular across the web and one of the primary reasons ads are slow in the first place. They've made improvements to speed up ads but they again hold an incredible amount of leverage to force better practices like smaller assets, less JS, async loading, https, no flash, etc and yet still havent don't anything about it. It seems like AMP was some small side project that's easy to praise and get attention without actually fixing any of the root causes for the web cruft issue, ultimately hurting everyone in the long run.
gotofritz 10y ago
I hate AMP because I can't bookmark nor email the URL to someone unless
sfifs 10y ago
AMP is not good thing says the guy making money off ads on his personal website and wants the ability to track users. What about the value of seconds amd bandwidth saved for millions of people who get pages a bit faster due to a project like AMP?

423 points by danielrm26 10y ago

I have been suffering with AMP. try to share a link to an article and you current url is an AMP url. if the site didn't make a hard link in the post title, you are gonna have a bad time.

ariwilson 10y ago

The reaction to AMP is a perfect example of when the things users/publishers care about differ greatly from developers. Users don't care about being on the publisher's site vs. Google's but do really care that that their low-to-medium end phone from 2014 can load the article in <5 seconds on a slow 3G connection. Publishers care that all of their tracking and ads are working properly.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Strangely I don't see any amp pages if I search within the Google app in Android but see them if search from Chrome. Does anyone know why is this difference? How can I restore amp pages while searching from Google app?

ptasci67 10y ago

I don't think this post really articulated any concrete reasons why AMP is good or bad. It just said it is.

ksk 10y ago
I saw several. 1. Single point of failure/control 2. It's a retraction from the web's inherent uhhh 'webby' nature where you can link to any content. 3. Google wants to become a 'toll booth' on the internet where it inserts itself between users and content. As an aside, I think people do sense a bit of hypocrisy from a lot of "benevolent" companies like Google. They're all open and standards-y when its about commoditizing a sector in which they don't have any direct financial interest. But they're fiercely closed and proprietary when it serves their interests.
FlorianRappl 10y ago
Well, that is not true. The author clearly stated that the problem with AMP is that it creates an artificial silo where all content is being distributed (i.e., in the hands of) Google. But I agree that more arguments (especially also listing the advantages of AMP) would have given the post more credibility.

kowdermeister 10y ago

If you share an AMP page it will indeed link to Google's CDN but if you click it it immediately redirects to the full article on desktop: http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png The full URL is still part of the shared link, so not much of a value has been lost, but the gain (speed boost) still outperforms this "inconvenience". I don't really feel the hatred against AMP, it works as intended and for me as an end user that's all that matters.

jansenv 10y ago
I really like AMP. As a web company, it reduces our hosting costs and is a cheater way to improve the rankings of our sites.

CJefferson 10y ago

Out of interest, is there anyone who wants to defend the current Google AMP (not the concept of lighter webpages, but how google has gone about it?) I haven't found anyone yet personally.

sideproject 10y ago
Just noticed a few days ago one of the major Australian newspapers started using AMP. I do understand the negativities around Google's AMP, but the speed was.. blazing fast. I can't help to think that for a user who may not be familiar with all the underlying issues, it is a pretty good user experience in terms of the speed alone.
- xeromal 10y ago
  I seek out AMP pages on my phone everytime. It's exceedingly faster than a typical page like CNN.
- Accacin 10y ago
  I'd image they've done that because they want to get on the news carousel,and only AMP sites appear in that. They're basically being forced to use it.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
As someone that dislikes viewing desktop sites on mobile devices I have no problems with AMP. It would seem the majority of people that have issues with it have to do with Google caching the content. If you don't like Google caching AMP content then host your own caching. It's free open source software.
- geofft 10y ago
  This is software vs. services confusion. It's sort of like saying that if you don't like Reddit's moderation policies, host your own Reddit, it's free software. Also, most people who complain about AMP claim that no caching is needed, just adherence to the AMP format. But there's no way to go from a Google search results page, or a link provided to you by someone who uses Google for search, to an uncached page.

moomin 10y ago

And another thing: it breaks the iOS reader feature, so it's frankly worse than the full fat page.

Isamu 10y ago
Ugh, "mobile" pages that break the reader are worse than suck. I use the reader all day long to make the mobile web bearable.
mikewhy 10y ago
Reader is working fine here. Do you have an example where it's not?
- moomin 10y ago
  You're right. Looks like it's been fixed at some point since I stopped clicking on AMP links.

steffenweber 10y ago

Google should reward fast / jank-free websites instead of rewarding websites that use one particular technology (AMP). On SERPs, both the "flash" icon and the AMP carousel are AMP-exclusive which suggests that Google is abusing its market power.

Zikes 10y ago
Bing also includes AMP in their search results: http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-t... AMP is a standard for creating fast / jank-free web sites, which all search engines can implement freely. Google is spearheading the effort because nobody else did, but they're not monopolizing it. Everyone is free to contribute.
- prebrov 10y ago
  Afaik, AMP is solely driven and developed by Google engineers, both standard and implementation. Everyone is free to follow, but they don't accept contributions. That is monopolising.
  - cramforce 10y ago
    It is not true that AMP does not accept contributions. What is your data to back that up? Here is actual data: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors AMP currently has 275 contributors (people whose code was merged) on its open source project. Lets aim high and say 50 of them work for Google (probably a bit less), that leaves about 225 other contributors.
xd1936 10y ago
They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

Zikes 10y ago

AMP specifications allow for other cache servers, of which CloudFlare[0] has recently implemented one. You could implement your own if you like. AMP also specifies that the canonical page URL should be used when sharing, though the cached URL is currently what's shown in the browser. Their last developer update[1] said they're working to address this, however for all relevant purposes Google's own systems already currently consider AMP traffic and results to be attributed to the original source. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-... [1] https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... > Google amends its cached AMP search results with Schema.org and OpenGraph metadata, so posting the link to any platform that honors these should result in the canonical URL being shared.

kyrra 10y ago
There is a decent amount of documentation about how the AMP cache works here: https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview

deleted 10y ago

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anigbrowl 10y ago

When i got a Nexus One way back when, it had a news app that preloaded the news with 4-8 paragraphs of plain text and a single photograph. It was great, I could catch up on the news while I was standing in a checkout line or similar short time-wasting situation. AMP gets somewhat back towards that, but it's still slow and unresponsive by comparison. Google doesn't get news. The people who work on google News clearly don't consume it, barring the unlikely possibility that they're masochists who enjoy making everyday tools work more and more poorly.

mynegation 10y ago

It got annoying enough for me to switch my search to bing.com everywhere, including Google's own browser. My two main complaints: 1. Once I am on AMP page, most of the time I want to click around the site and I cannot do that - feels like a cage. 2. URL obfuscates the site name and article title (not completely, but definitely adds visual noise)

__jal 10y ago
2a) I want to get to the site, not another Google property. Penalize my search listing all you like, but none of my stuff will be hosted elsewhere. I thought publishers learned their lessons here - use someone else's printing press, and ultimately, they control what's printed.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  This is the part that I don't understand. Why are publishers so eager to give away control of their meal-ticket?
  - wmf 10y ago
    They can always turn AMP off if Google does something evil.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      And lose their ranking? It won't be as simple as "just turn it off"
sjcsjc 10y ago
Agree. I did exactly this a couple of days ago when trying to get the URL of a BBC news article. I had never used bing before that.
the_watcher 10y ago
The lack of navigation within the AMP site is the reason I avoid clicking an AMP link if at all possible

davewasthere 10y ago

Similar to Medium, AMP encourages fast page loads and no interstitials, pop-ups or other cancer that seems to infest the average site these days. Yes, it may be possible to fix it over time. But I see AMP and Medium as clean, lightweight platforms that developers/marketers want to emulate and users will start to demand. From a user experience, you definitely can't beat the speed of AMP delivered content. So it's a high bar to beat. But if it forces content providers to up their game, I see it as a good thing. I guess the scary point, that hasn't explicitly been mentioned, is what happens when a good portion (maybe not a majority) of content is AMP-enabled. Is it something we transition away from, or is it here to stay? Will non-AMP, but fast pages be second-class citizens in the new AMP-era?

stonogo 10y ago
Nothing about Medium is lightweight. Consider this one-sentence article that results in a 1.2MB pageload: https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524 https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... There are more examples and a broader examination available from idlewords: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- djrogers 10y ago
  Lucky you - that medium link was a 2.19MB download on my laptop.
  - bartread 10y ago
    That's really strange. 760KB for me, but it was a good 3 - 4 seconds before everything had rendered. The article content was there much more quickly, but the recommendations and responses sections below took longer to appear. Crazy because when you look at Medium it does appear to be very clean so this experience has certainly been somewhat disillusioning.

mrfusion 10y ago

The other problem with amp is that it's really hard to share an artical. I was reading one on google news and I wanted to share it with you guys but I couldn't figure out how to get a URL for the story.

interfacesketch 10y ago

Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS? I feel that many web developers don't realise that simple HTML and CSS is often all you need to make clear, fast loading pages. No complicated tricks or techniques required. You can make the page reasonably pleasant in appearance too. Think of the sites you often visit: news stories, blogs, magazine-style sites, discussion sites. These are mostly text, not web apps. I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but I'd like to ask if readers find the web page links below fast to load on their mobile phones? They don't use AMP. I created the pages below as a test because I was (and still am) frustrated by the slow page-loading speeds when using my phone with a 3G connection. The page links below represent a common article/blog/report style of page. There's about 2500+ words on the page. The page content is CC licensed but the pictures from the original synopsis are not included despite the references in the text (since this was just a test) So is it fast? Version A: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html Here is an identical version to the above but one that loads custom fonts (approx 40kb extra). Is this slower? Version B: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html

newsat13 10y ago
> Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS? Can you suggest frameworks that help me do this automatically? Please no, raw html. I daresay that those would recommend developing without frameworks have no experience maintaining other people's projects.
- Zikes 10y ago
  We need it like we needed "use strict" in JS, which is to say not really, but it really helps. I think of AMP as "HTML Strict", a means of enforcing the rules and practices necessary for faster web sites.
  - 10y ago

newsat13 10y ago

Just like we have made silos on the mobile market, the internet will slowly get it's own silos. For people to value decentralization, they need to be shown direct and observable value. Just taking a moral/ethical stand is not enough. This is the case with anything and not just technology. The cars and the phones we use probably enslave chinese and kill polar bears.. but for all what the general population cares those things don't exist/happen. This comes down to human nature.

ucaetano 10y ago

> The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself. It seems the author isn't familiar with how CDNs work, how they've been around for many years and how they serve most of the data on the internet. When you browse YT, the data most likely isn't being served by Google directly, but by a Google-provided rack on your local ISP. When you browse a newspaper website, it is most likely coming out of an Akamai or some other CDN's server in your local ISP. Akamai by itself serves about 30Tbps of local traffic around the world. And before these massive CDNs emerged, small ISPs would use caching solutions for static content (most of the web back then). So we've all been loading content from 3rd party servers for more than a decade, not from the website itself. The internet as it is today is only sustainable because of CDNs.

ksk 10y ago
IMHO, the quoted statement doesn't necessarily preclude CDNs. I think you're reading too much into the phrasing, which like you suggested, is a laypersons view of the internet. To me, it is instantly obvious what the author meant. The question is who controls the platform. For e.g. Are you in control if Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the future Google is free to show "suggested" content which is not your own, etc, etc.
- ucaetano 10y ago
  > "Are you in control if Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the future Google is free to show "suggested" content which is not your own, etc, etc." Just don't use Google's CDN then, use someone else's, like Cloudflare or Bing.

dccoolgai 10y ago

I remember when Google had a really awesome thing that provided great content experiences: It was called Google Reader. I wish they would take some of the energy they are using trying to force AMP down everyone's throats and just re-launch Reader.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
And the beautiful thing is, RSS feeds load quickly with no scripts, embedded ads, or tracking, and isn't tied to any proprietary cloud service provider. More and more I am convinced Google convinces everyone to move away from things just so they can "reinvent" them down the line in a more proprietary fashion.
- mikewhy 10y ago
  There totally are RSS feeds with ads and tracking.
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    Including Google Reader. You could put ads in the feed. If you really want to track people an image load is enough, too, although it's harder to plug third parties in.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I mean, sure, you can put like... text ads in an RSS feed, and I'm sure you can throw a tracking link as a link to click on in there. But unless you click into the page from the RSS feed, you aren't going to be picking up any stray cookies or have any scripts running on your computer. Browsing an RSS reader is very fast, and has very little bloat.

meerita 10y ago

Just adblock and you will get a fast browsing experience. The biggest problem is not web development, but the advertising framework that is installed nowadays.

nachtigall 10y ago

AMP is about lock-in. I'll just leave this here: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-la...

jstewartmobile 10y ago

AMP has been a blatant power-play from square-one. It's nice to see it being called out on a site as prominent as Miessler's.

wffurr 10y ago

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first result (probably personalized?). Had to go to the fourth result for something with AMP, from CIO.com. The page loaded instantly, was able to scroll without things jumping around, and the header link to the CIO.com homepage worked as expected. They were still able to serve ads and count my pageview too, even if I never directly contacted their server. I just don't get what the big deal is.

mort96 10y ago
I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.
- mikewhy 10y ago
  The fact that the person receiving the link will also get a fast loading well behaved page with a bar at the top is not such a deal breaker for everyone.
- asdfologist 10y ago
  I don't care and I doubt most users do. AMP has made my mobile browsing experience effectively much faster.
- wffurr 10y ago
  Just for giggles, I hit "copy link" in the Chrome Webview that the Android Google Search App opened up. Pasted that into Android Chrome, and it took me straight the AMP page, which loaded instantly and let me scroll right away. Seems fine. I then went to my desktop, used the Chrome history feature to open the tab from my mobile, and the AMP URL redirected me to the publisher's desktop site, which took multiple seconds to load and then displayed an annoying interstitial. If anything, I'm frustrated that my desktop browser wouldn't open the AMP page and load and allow scrolling immediately with no interstitials. The "huge useless bar" at the top was the exact same in the AGSA Chrome Webview as the OP's non-AMP site. I don't know what you're on about. I didn't notice it because it's not there. I went and looked at the search results in Android Chrome (instead of the Google Search app), and there was an extra bar at the top that said "From cio.com" which disappeared as soon as I scrolled, which happened instantly because I was able to load and scroll instantly.

wenbert 10y ago

I feel sometimes the web is going in circles. A) First we had simple web pages B) Then people want to do fancy stuff on it. It became slower C) Back to A Instead of going back to "A", it seems like there new are ideas are coming out (like AMP) but in the end, I really wish we would just go back to "A". HTML is HTML.

tdkl 10y ago
The company who is selling you the B+ package (ads, tracking) now reinvented A to leave the same + "features" intact.

amiga-workbench 10y ago

AMP is exactly what our industry deserves for doing such an awful job in regards to performance for so long.

forgotAgain 10y ago

This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish.

brilliantcode 10y ago

While the article is correct that there's a big conflict of interest emerging in terms of privacy, it will be exactly like the reaction we've had to all other news of violations on the internet. We've got people with remote controlled submarines siphoning data from the pipes. Yet no outright revolt. People just aren't able to fathom the compromises without the technical framework that most HN'ers have to be able to catch these things in the app. I'm sure 16 years ago we argued that Google eating up search market would be bad for consumers. People gladly voted Google while ditching Yahoo, Altavista, and other search engines for Google. It will be the same case for AMP or PWAMPs (Progressive Web App + AMP), they are here to stay. So yes, while you can put a sticker with "AMP? Not in my backyard" on your laptop, but the vast majority of consumers simply don't care. We are all self serving bunch. Unless more is done other than writing articles and sharing, the status quo will be whatever the unchallenged decides it will be, with the money and resources to see to it. The rest of us can only vote with our money. The internet is not a democracy after all unless we have some type of mesh networking using our mobile phones, is coupled to governments and their willingness to keep the underweater fibre cables. Creating our own satellite mesh network is obviously out of the question as well.

27182818284 10y ago

There is a lot of hostility lately toward AMP it seems like. I personally really enjoy it and have found myself now choosing AMP articles over non-article because I know the mobile experience won't suck. One thing I noticed in the author's post: The author mentions that "The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself." I don't think that is correct unless you use choose to use the AMP-cache. For example, if you curl https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/23/donald-trump-first-orders-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp You get back the content such as "Nancy Pelosi, Democratic..."

matchu 10y ago

Be sure to read Paul Bakaus's response, "Why AMP caches exist", to hear both sides of the issue. https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/amp/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... (Though, actually, it's only a response in spirit; Bakaus's article was posted about a week earlier than Miessler's.) I think the problem with the AMP cache model is that, because you need to link directly to the cached URL, you commit to exactly one cache provider. If Bing were to also implement their own validated AMP cache for Bing search results, you can't have one link point to both; you're either AMPed in Google results or in Bing results, and, by being marginally bigger, Google wins all of the pie. That's no good. How might we change the AMP standard, or the trust model around AMP caches, to get the same performance wins while still enabling competition?

amelius 10y ago

Can't Google just penalize slower-than-necessary pages in their search results?

apeace 10y ago

The core argument of this article is flawed. AMP does not break normal links--although the Google search engine sort of does. As an example of using AMP with normal links, see Cloudflare's implementation[0]. It is possible for many CDN-like services to implement AMP caches. Web sites link to each other normally, and mobile visitors can be served the AMP version. Remember that AMP is an open standard and accepting pull requests[1]. > Who (other than Google) can possibly see this as a good thing? Users want faster pages. From all these AMP critics, I have never heard an alternate solution, or even an idea, of how we can streamline delivery of article content. AMP is imperfect. But it is a step in the right direction _for users_. Critics need to step up with a better idea, or maybe some code, and quit with the (in this case, unfounded) rhetoric. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ [1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

wmf 10y ago
I can't wait for the "remove the AMP cache concept" pull request.
RodericDay 10y ago
here's the idea: give pages amp ratings purely based on full-load page-speed. amp pages get it, vanilla hackernews gets it too.
- apeace 10y ago
  IIRC Google already does this. But it doesn't solve the same problem as AMP does. With your solution, site A can load at 2s and site B at 3s, and site A will win. With AMP, sites A and B can both load in 200ms by easily integrating with an open standard. Also: all this talk of "lock-in" and "centralization". With the approach you proposed, the publisher with the most money to spend on dev resources wins the highest search ranking. Isn't that counter to decentralization? Isn't an open, simple standard like AMP a better solution (though not a perfect one)? What I'd like to hear from an AMP critic is: how can we achieve what AMP achieves--lightning-fast speeds that users love--without the "evil" AMP approach?

throw2016 10y ago

This is probably the 5th article on amp in the last few days but its already a reality so it would perhaps have helped if this intense focus was put much earlier. A large number of mainstream sites are already on amp. The rest will inevitably be forced to follow. It's done. It's a clear abuse of power by Google which would ideally be illegal given its near monopoly search position. Trading convenience for a lock-in is an extremely poor tradeoff in the long run and its a miracle no legal action is in the offing. This is the negative outcome of capitalism, concentration of power which inevitably gets abused.

superkuh 10y ago

Cloudflare is doing this AMP crap too. If a cloudflare user enables AMP on his site then links from their domain to yours will trigger a visit of Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; +https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot) AppleWebKit/534.34" which then mirrors the content from your domain and re-hosts it on Cloudflare servers. Then whenever someone goes to the Cloudflare user's website and clicks a link to your website they'll instead be fed a version of the page from Cloudflare and you'll never see that traffic. And since you (or me, in this case) don't have a Cloudflare account you can't get any response from Cloudflare support to get them to stop re-hosting and serving your content from their servers.

fivre 10y ago
Requests from non-user accounts do still get responses, just not quickly. You may have more luck with Twitter.
ej_campbell 10y ago
Publisher's see AMP traffic since they are in control of ads and analytics used in amp page.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

inian 10y ago

We need tools to help developers build fast websites. If all websites were as fast as AMP and Instant Articles, these platforms would become obsolete. It is in our hands as developers to take back control and make the web as decentralised as possible.

IgorPartola 10y ago

It is one of the most annoying things to use, and might actually get me to switch my default search engine. I often search for stuff where the results come up on Reddit. I want to see the comments, but AMP helpfully hides all replies, and only shows like the top 5-10 comments. This is useless. So now instead of getting to the page I want right away, I have to scroll down to the button that says "see more comments". WTF?

makecheck 10y ago
If you use DuckDuckGo you can include "g!" in a search to Google it instead (except in a way that does not return AMP results).

mark_l_watson 10y ago

AMP is probably good for web users. However, I believe that AMP goes against the free and distributed spirit of the web. I am somewhat a Google fan, happily paying for music, tv shows, movies, and use the Google cloud platform. I also get some value from Facebook. That said, I think that Google and Facebook are going to eventually badly damage the web, or at least the web that I love.

PascLeRasc 10y ago

It doesn't seem like the author says why they think it's bad that Google stores articles on its own servers, just that everyone should know already. Not very convincing.

awqrre 10y ago

Google started stealing content a long time ago on their search page... sometime displaying almost whole pages of content as the first "search result" so that the user doesn't even need to visit the source.

madeofpalk 10y ago
Does it count as stealing if websites opt into it?
- tdkl 10y ago
  Some call it "SEO optimization" I call it extortion because they'll get better ranks and a "carousell".

manigandham 10y ago

AMP is a terrible idea. HTML is already very fast, if it's just kept lean and clean. Creating a new fork of HTML only means less resources for publishers to spend on their existing sites, creating an ever-increasing divergence in experience. Google already had a great way to enforce better performance by taking it into account for search rankings - which it already uses as we've seen just a few days ago to discourage popup modals. Another issue is that Google's adtech software is the most popular across the web and one of the primary reasons ads are slow in the first place. They've made improvements to speed up ads but they again hold an incredible amount of leverage to force better practices like smaller assets, less JS, async loading, https, no flash, etc and yet still havent don't anything about it. It seems like AMP was some small side project that's easy to praise and get attention without actually fixing any of the root causes for the web cruft issue, ultimately hurting everyone in the long run.

gotofritz 10y ago

I hate AMP because I can't bookmark nor email the URL to someone unless

sfifs 10y ago

AMP is not good thing says the guy making money off ads on his personal website and wants the ability to track users. What about the value of seconds amd bandwidth saved for millions of people who get pages a bit faster due to a project like AMP?