5 ms·

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 f

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.
wmf 10y ago
I don't think AMP is nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. The complaints I've seen on HN either only affect developers or are entirely hypothetical.
headcanon 10y ago
1. I can click a link to an article from a search result 2. I can read the article without having to wait 5 mins for every little javascript and popup to finish 3. Success Optimizing a rich content-heavy website is hard, and time consuming. While we all can moan about all the tracking and ads that appear on these sites, they are a fact of life, and simply relying on the engineering chops of every website to up their game is not a winning strategy. It's infinitely simpler at the end of the day to drop in a few extra scripts and meta tags than to yak-shave-optimize the entire site.
- bartread 10y ago
  We haven't quite reached the point where performance is seen as core functionality. What I will say is that if they've built the site sensibly it should be a case of optimising templates and views rather than yak-shaving-optimising every single page, which is a much more approachable endeavour. I'm probably going to get flak for this but tracking aside, and I can understand the arguments for that, from my experience a lot of poor performance is down to cargo cult development on the client side. On the flip-side, if you want an example of a content heavy media site that gets it right: http://www.bbc.com/news http://www.bbc.com/news.
  - headcanon 10y ago
    Certainly, and a lot of it depends on the kind of engineering culture that the particular organization has. Shops like BBC and (especially) Bloomberg have really solid engineering org, which means they have a high degree of give-a-shit, and they have the flexibility to try more cutting-edge solutions that may require in-house maintenance. But as we all know, developing a good engineering culture is difficult and expensive and not everyone can do it.
mark242 10y ago
Sure. AMP is a good thing. Google is simply the first company to implement the AMP cache-- Cloudflare has recently spun up their own and outbound links from Cloudflare-enabled sites can use an AMP cache that doesn't rely on Google, so they get the speed benefits as well. The implementation of AMP is one of those technologies that's "the more it gets deployed, the better it is." Reading the spec, it's clear that Google's vision is for AMP to be the opposite of FB instant articles; where the entire web can have a decentralized cache (yes this sounds weird but makes sense). I suspect Cloudflare will help quite a bit with this. I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers.
- jsnell 10y ago
  > I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers. How would that work? Google can replace links to AMP pages with links to their own AMP cache in their search results, since they're the ones generating those resutls. Cloudflare can serve the AMP version of their customers' pages since they are the ones actually terminating the TLS connection. Mobile operators don't have either type of access. At best they could try to do this for non-encrypted content with some kind of a transparent proxy. But the share of non-encrypted content is plummeting quickly, and might as well not exist soon. No operator is going to invest any money in HTTP-only services at this point.
  - mark242 10y ago
    Just anycast cdn.ampproject.org to a cluster sitting on your network with Google's supervision and cert? This is added value for the provider, just like sticking a bunch of Akamai boxes on your network is added value.
judah 10y ago
Christian Heilmann (formerly of Mozilla, now Microsoft) recently interviewed[0] AMP developer Paul Bakaus. It was a fantastic interview, as Heilmann grilled Bakaus on some of the issues raised in this thread. [0]: https://www.christianheilmann.com/2017/01/05/first-decoded-chat-of-the-year-paul-bakaus-on-amp/ https://www.christianheilmann.com/2017/01/05/first-decoded-c...

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.

wmf 10y ago

I don't think AMP is nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. The complaints I've seen on HN either only affect developers or are entirely hypothetical.

headcanon 10y ago

1. I can click a link to an article from a search result 2. I can read the article without having to wait 5 mins for every little javascript and popup to finish 3. Success Optimizing a rich content-heavy website is hard, and time consuming. While we all can moan about all the tracking and ads that appear on these sites, they are a fact of life, and simply relying on the engineering chops of every website to up their game is not a winning strategy. It's infinitely simpler at the end of the day to drop in a few extra scripts and meta tags than to yak-shave-optimize the entire site.

bartread 10y ago
We haven't quite reached the point where performance is seen as core functionality. What I will say is that if they've built the site sensibly it should be a case of optimising templates and views rather than yak-shaving-optimising every single page, which is a much more approachable endeavour. I'm probably going to get flak for this but tracking aside, and I can understand the arguments for that, from my experience a lot of poor performance is down to cargo cult development on the client side. On the flip-side, if you want an example of a content heavy media site that gets it right: http://www.bbc.com/news http://www.bbc.com/news.
- headcanon 10y ago
  Certainly, and a lot of it depends on the kind of engineering culture that the particular organization has. Shops like BBC and (especially) Bloomberg have really solid engineering org, which means they have a high degree of give-a-shit, and they have the flexibility to try more cutting-edge solutions that may require in-house maintenance. But as we all know, developing a good engineering culture is difficult and expensive and not everyone can do it.

mark242 10y ago

Sure. AMP is a good thing. Google is simply the first company to implement the AMP cache-- Cloudflare has recently spun up their own and outbound links from Cloudflare-enabled sites can use an AMP cache that doesn't rely on Google, so they get the speed benefits as well. The implementation of AMP is one of those technologies that's "the more it gets deployed, the better it is." Reading the spec, it's clear that Google's vision is for AMP to be the opposite of FB instant articles; where the entire web can have a decentralized cache (yes this sounds weird but makes sense). I suspect Cloudflare will help quite a bit with this. I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers.

jsnell 10y ago
> I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers. How would that work? Google can replace links to AMP pages with links to their own AMP cache in their search results, since they're the ones generating those resutls. Cloudflare can serve the AMP version of their customers' pages since they are the ones actually terminating the TLS connection. Mobile operators don't have either type of access. At best they could try to do this for non-encrypted content with some kind of a transparent proxy. But the share of non-encrypted content is plummeting quickly, and might as well not exist soon. No operator is going to invest any money in HTTP-only services at this point.
- mark242 10y ago
  Just anycast cdn.ampproject.org to a cluster sitting on your network with Google's supervision and cert? This is added value for the provider, just like sticking a bunch of Akamai boxes on your network is added value.

judah 10y ago

Christian Heilmann (formerly of Mozilla, now Microsoft) recently interviewed[0] AMP developer Paul Bakaus. It was a fantastic interview, as Heilmann grilled Bakaus on some of the issues raised in this thread. [0]: https://www.christianheilmann.com/2017/01/05/first-decoded-chat-of-the-year-paul-bakaus-on-amp/ https://www.christianheilmann.com/2017/01/05/first-decoded-c...