21 ms·

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• richdougherty 9y ago
  In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly. However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition. * In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.
  • SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Google using their search monopoly to create a distribution monopoly is also extremely worrying.
    • j1vms 9y ago
      > Google using their search monopoly to create a distribution monopoly is also extremely worrying. Google is using any means possible to keep the web (html, js, css) relevant in the age of native apps (that includes Facebook app running on Android). If the web stays relevant, the same goes for Google search.
      • matthewmacleod 9y ago
        In contrast, I think google is making every effort possible to direct people away from the web and into the Google ecosystem. Searching for maps? Google. Searching for flights? Google. Searching for information? Google. The list goes on, and the technical means for delivery is essentially irrelevant.
        • stekenwright 9y ago
          Definitely trying, but overreaching. The public is starting to cut out Google/the middleman and it's really just forcing shoppers into Amazon's ecosystem, those searching for flights to Skyscanner etc.
        • tyingq 9y ago
          Rich snippets is the catch all for everything else. You can see a preview for what that means by checking out Wikipedia's traffic decline over the last 3 years or so.
          • joshuamorton 9y ago
            To be fair, at least in wikipedia's case, that's potentially a good thing. Wikipedia isn't ad-supported, so having their data hosted elsewhere isn't actually a problem (as long as credit is given and so donations continue), because it becomes less expensive for them to host.
            • deleted 9y ago
              [deleted]
    • aanm1988 9y ago
      Nah man, it's all good. I mean sure, we keep giving absurd amounts of power to an ad company but it's google, who doesn't love google. If it was microsoft they already would have shut this down because of the backlash. Google does it and people are fine with it.
    • kilotaras 9y ago
      Isn't that an antitrust move by google?
  • TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    > I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page We already had this two decades ago: WAP, its contemporaries (i-mode), and its immediate successors (XHTML Mobile Profile).
    • frozenport 9y ago
      Except mobile Web adoption in 2002 was poor because of form factor, among other things.
      • TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
        Oh sure. Though I'm not actually trying to criticise the idea of a subset, if anything I'd support it. I'm just pointing to potentially useful precedent. It's not a new idea.
    • matthewmacleod 9y ago
      Sure, and those were good solutions for the time - nothing wrong with similar approaches in a modern context.
    • cramforce 9y ago
      Big difference was that these had custom renderers. AMP renders in any web browser since they are just web pages.
  • Antrikshy 9y ago
    I didn't realize AMP content was hosted by Google.
    • wmf 9y ago
      Yeah, one of the biggest problems with AMP is that it works very differently than how the documentation leads you to think it works.
    • ehsankia 9y ago
      The original content is still on the website, Google hosts a cache server, rehosting the website's content around the world closer to the users for faster access, for free. In theory, it's a win-win-win situation. Publisher gets free hosting (with analytics and ad money still coming to them obviously), users get a faster experience and Google is happier if the users browser more content. In reality, AMP is obviously not perfect but they have been addressing common issues and improving. I may not be fully sold on it yet, but I don't understand the massive blind hatred. Saying "people can just optimize their website" doesn't mean shit. They've had years and no one has been. Sites have been getting slower every year despite browsers getting faster. No one gave a single shit until AMP came around...
      • scott_karana 9y ago
        Google has, and should, downranked slow pages in favour of fast ones. But instead of simply pushing that aspect harder, they're actively promoting their own tech.
        • emmelaich 9y ago
          > Google has, and should, downranked slow pages in favour of fast ones. They do.
      • acdha 9y ago
        The main problems I have are that it breaks two really important web features: sharing links and trust. Users seeing google.com URLs means they trust them more, which has helped propaganda sites and phishers. The other thing is that for me, AMP has not been faster many times. I know they're working on it but having to download and run 100KB of external JavaScript before rendering frequently meant that it was slower than the real page. It helps the stragglers but e.g. WaPo or NYT load just as fast and that should be enough.
  • JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition Considering we're on the precipice of a global authoritarian-populist cycle, there are non-market consequences to such concentration, too.
    • jdormit 9y ago
      What is an authoritarian-populist cycle?
      • trueSlav 9y ago
        Anyone that isn't a full on left winger. I.e. crying about authoritarianism when you yourself, >by definition< of using the word "populist" in this context, are an authoritanian. Lefties don't like that people can see the bad consequences of unchecked globalism and multiculturalism, but the politicians who aligned with these ideas tend to be popular... so what do you do? Basically consider huge amounts of people idiots who don't know what's good for them and call any politicians with that uncomfortable voter base "populists". Since for every leftist, democracy is great only to a point when it starts to produce results they don't like.
      • tajen 9y ago
        Brexit, Trump, FN, Erdogan, etc.
    • zambal 9y ago
      What makes you think we're on this precipice?
      • angry-hacker 9y ago
        I'm surprised if you think otherwise. WE are on the mercy of few SV companies and whatever they decide or push is our fate.
  • bitmapbrother 9y ago
    >Content should remain on the publisher's site. Publishers are free to implement their own cache and host their own content. AMP is open source and they can modify it however they like.
    • richdougherty 9y ago
      I mean that when you click a search result in Google you should go to the publisher's site, not to Google's cache of the content. It may have changed since, but that's how it was implemented originally by Google: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang... "…but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Google.com (for example, google.com/amp/yoursite.com/yourpage/amp), not to your site. A Google spokesperson confirms that there isn’t a way to both have your AMP-optimized appear in Google’s prioritized search listings without having that content hosted on Google’s AMP Cache servers."
      • bitmapbrother 9y ago
        I was under the impression that the publisher could elect to use their own servers for their AMP content. Is this not possible anymore?
        • callahad 9y ago
          There's a lot of doublespeak around this. 1. You can (and must) host AMP content on servers of your own choosing. 2. Google's crawlers ingest your AMP content, validate it, and re-host it in Google's AMP Cache. Bing and other folks run similar crawlers and caches. 3. Google search results will only link to AMP content on Google's own cache. So yes, you can host your content on your own servers. And you can give people direct URLs to that content. But Google users will only ever see links to the copy of your content that Google hosts; your servers never see that traffic. There is no way to opt-out and still be considered a valid AMP page.
    • jwlato 9y ago
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    >However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Google isn't the only party running an AMP cache. > Content should remain on the publisher's site. It does. Its also cached by aggregators, and AMP is designed to take advantage of being accessed from a shared cache. >
    • kuschku 9y ago
      That exact caching has to end. They can offer to do a CDN like CloudFlare, but make it optional. I want to ensure that not a single bit of my data ever runs through Google's infrastructure, while still getting all the same benefits as if it did. If Google treats sites different just for using an AMP Cache, then I'll have to send another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee. My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G) I can't just massively increase load time for pages just for a better ranking in search results, this shouldn't even be a choice.
  • EvilTerran 9y ago
    Seems to me the right approach would be for sites to embrace the HTML5 semantic tags (<nav>, <article> and so forth), and browsers to offer a way to view just that semantically-marked-up content - without scripts, with restricted CSS, and maybe with some kind of filtering out of third-party content. Something like Firefox's "reader view", but including more bits of the page. So the browser would still be downloading the exact same HTML document (straight from the publisher's server, how you want it) - just then ignoring all the clutter. Compare to AMP, which AFAICT necessitates serving a whole separate version of the page with only the blessed markup... it reminds me of the bad old days, having a separate mobile site instead of a single responsive design for all devices. All seems rather antithetical to that grand ideal of separating structure and presentation.
    • captainmuon 9y ago
      An idea I've been floating for a while is to have two HTML profiles in the future. Call it HTML6 document and HTML6 app. HTML6 document is a restricted subset, similar to what you suggest. I would still allow complete design flexibility, and I might even allow a subset of JS, but only for presentation purposes. Definitely not turing complete, and no ajax etc.. Probably I wouldn't allow cross-origin resources with credentials. So you could include an image or stylesheet, but the browser would not send along cookies. What I'm aiming for is a replacement for PDF, something you could read on an ebook, etc.. Just a plain document. On the other hand, I'd have HTML6 app to be able to use the complete web platform.
      • madeofpalk 9y ago
        This sounds good as a dream, but in reality it would actually achieve anything because everyone, including the publishers, would just use 'HTML6 app'.
      • codedokode 9y ago
        You can make light web pages with current technologies but nobody wants a page without advertisement, popups, analytics and notifications.
      • 9y ago
  • zackbloom 9y ago
    It's worth pointing out Cloudflare has a competing AMP serving tool: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...
    • tyingq 9y ago
      I haven't yet seen a non Google hosted AMP page in Google's carousel. Does that happen? If not, it's somewhat telling.
      • notatoad 9y ago
        No, it does not happen, nor will it ever because that's fundamentally not how AMP caching works. A site doesn't pick an amp cache like they pick a hosting provider, with some sites cached on cloudflare-amp while others are hosted on google-amp. All amp content is on all amp caches. Google search is one AMP client, and it uses google's AMP cache. If, for example, bing wanted to serve AMP pages, they would need to choose an AMP cache to serve them from, and cloudflare's offering would be an option. One of the problems that AMP is trying to solve is individual websites hosting on insufficient architecture. If each site was allowed to choose what AMP cache it was served from, that would defeat the purpose. It's up to the client to choose the cache it uses, to ensure a consistent speed.
        • tyingq 9y ago
          That's pretty much the point I was making. The wording from Google to publishers doesn't make this clear. It is the implementation they chose, and it does have speed benefits. But, an edge cache that allows the end user more control, their own domain, an no hijacking header is possible, and would provide a notable speed benefit. If there were a choice between the two, publishers would likely pick the latter.
          • notatoad 9y ago
            Publishers had a choice, and they overwhelmingly chose to host their sites on infrastructure that was too slow. That's why the AMP project exists, to take choices like that away from publishers, because they consistently make the wrong choices when you give them one.
  • nialv7 9y ago
    Ever heard about RSS? ;)
  • captainmuon 9y ago
    > Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition. Only in this weird world of third-party-served-js-ads. In an ideal world, I wouldn't care about where my content is served from. I just care 1) that many people see it, and if it is commercial 2) that I get money for it. I could just add some ads as inline to my article, served in the same way as my article's illustrations are. Not sure google allows that, though. Wouldn't surprize me if not.
  • madeofpalk 9y ago
    Right. Here's the problem and confusion with Google AMP: it's actually two seperate products. 1. There's the HTML/CSS/JS library/subset that's a good framework for building pages that load quickly 2. There's the 'CDN' that integrates with Google Search to preload and 'iFrame' the site in. Google 'has' to host/'iFrame' the content in their own google.com/amp pages because that's the only way to preload a page to make it display instantly.
• notgood 9y ago
  "publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it. That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
  • mcphage 9y ago
    > Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence Well, yes. It really is.
    • loup-vaillant 9y ago
      Err… No? Software is ubiquitous now, and that tend to make it more important than basically everything else. It is also a means of expression (not the only one of course, but still). Finally, how software is build can alter how you read the news (start with profanity filters, then block Tienanmen or something).
  • matthewmacleod 9y ago
    The key difference is that there are alternatives to iOS, which isn't even a majority share of the market. Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.
    • velobro 9y ago
      Then Apple should make their own search engine...
      • 9y ago
• skybrian 9y ago
  "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Is anyone working on a competing standard?
  • DamonHD 9y ago
    Well, yes, it's called WebpageTest + HTML5. I care about page weight and have mine render quickly without AMP and without being in Google's clutches. In particular I try to have the page sensibly renderable with the first 10kB or so of content down the wire. And I try not to have anything critical depend on JavaScript.
    • skybrian 9y ago
      But without branding, it's not the same thing. To compete, someone would need to make an icon and popularize it to compete with the "AMP" icon.
      • DamonHD 9y ago
        I vote for a 1-pixel black-cat GIF logo. Well, any colour and format you like so long as it's black...
  • MBCook 9y ago
    It's called HTML, and it's been around for a number of years. If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads… you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be. This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies. The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.
    • skybrian 9y ago
      You're missing the point. Once you've clicked on the link, it's too late. Putting an icon on the link that says "this isn't one of those bloated pages" seems useful, particularly for people on slow connections. In theory, someone else could create another standard and write browser extensions to put an icon on links that meet that standard. The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.
• Antrikshy 9y ago
  I agree 100% with his frustration with AMP scrolling behavior on iOS.
  • foobarbazetc 9y ago
    Yup. It's like Google want everyone to experience the crappy scrolling on Android everywhere. :) On a more serious note it is extremely frustrating. Everything about the AMP UX on iOS is broken.
• zghst 9y ago
  Man, business is hard. Millions of voices, easy to die by a thousand of cuts.
• wastedbrains 9y ago
  agreed
• marricks 9y ago
  I know it might not be their shtick, but I wish the post focused more on the "publication independence" part of the criticism. Giving Google control over prioritizing a subset of the web, and letting them optimize for it, just gives them a better way to filter content. They seriously have enough power over the web as it is. The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue. Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.
  • exergy 9y ago
    Well said. It seems impossible for me to believe that the trajectory Google is on doesn't end in catastrophic, dystopian disaster for us, the consumers. That should have been the focus, rather than scrolling behaviour.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    Gruber's first link ( that's not part of the quoted block or a link to the article he's quoting from ) going to a previous piece of his about the publication independence problems of going along with AMP.
• colinbartlett 9y ago
  If you hate AMP as much as I do, I highly recommend switching your mobile browser to DuckDuckGo. The results are as good as Google and no AMP.
  • Semaphor 9y ago
    > The results are as good as Google and no AMP. I use ddg myself and as much as I like it, it's still quite a bit away from Google in quality of search results. Usually it's good enough, but I still get result pages where ddg has nothing I want and appending !g gives me what I want in #1
    • jeffbax 9y ago
      Same, I use DDG, but fall back to the > !g bang quite often when I need to really find something
  • macNchz 9y ago
    I switched my phone to DDG a few months ago because I was sick of crappy AMP pages. I find the results to be decent for quick searches but not helpful for really researching something–which I'm okay with since I don't usually do heavy research on my phone and I can add a !g if I'm not getting what I need.
  • winteriscoming 9y ago
    Have been using DuckDuckGo as primary search engine for more than a year. It's OK for many cases but the search results aren't yet there in terms of quality or relevance in many cases. Even searching for AMP shows the AMP spec page after some almost useless dictionary sites, in the search results.
• tambourine_man 9y ago
  Original link was submitted, flagged (why?) and vouched for. Tried to submit again and, instead of up voting the previous one, it got resubmitted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919
  • sctb 9y ago
    Thanks, we updated the link of this submission to the original from https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp. The previous submission was older than the threshold to be considered a duplicate, which is why it went through on its own.
• rubyn00bie 9y ago
  Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them. I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet." This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders. One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.
  • jwilcoxson 9y ago
    Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.
    • ams6110 9y ago
      It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
      • dwighttk 9y ago
        one of the last areas I've found myself going back to google is when I'm searching for a gif... Duck Duck Go will return them, but it is usually a very small subset of the available gifs out there.
    • eps 9y ago
      It is actually Bing, which DDG uses for the bulk of its results.
• wanda 9y ago
  A little late to the party. People have been criticising AMP for all of the reasons mentioned in this pointless article for many months prior.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    Yep. I think he's written about it before too. The first thing in the article that's not a quote is a link to one of his previous articles. But he has a link blog, he saw a article he wanted to share, and he added his thoughts as he always does. And if people listen this time now that we've all had experience of AMP being around for a while ? Sounds good to me.
• SanPilot 9y ago
  I do not understand the dislike this community harbors for AMP. I personally really enjoy the system; whenever I'm searching for any type of article on my phone (Android), I prefer AMP pages, because they load faster and are far more responsive than some of their more bloated counterparts.
  • tyingq 9y ago
    Google did offer a carrot to go with the stick, yes. Those eating the carrots don't yet see the stick.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    The fact that you say android explains everything to me. I'm sure Google made sure it was a decent experience on their operating system. But it's clear they didn't give two seconds thought to iOS, and haven't bothered to improve it since it was released. It really does make google search feel broken. Many of the top results no longer "work right". Ignoring all the other issues of who is in control and whether it's a walled garden and all that other stuff… On iOS it's a terrible user experience. That ALONE would make me hate it.
    • izacus 9y ago
      Well now you know how most of those web pages felt on Android before - web devs tested on mobile Safari and left pages broken and utterly stuttery on Android web browser.
      • foobarbazetc 9y ago
        That's because Chrome on Android sucked.
        • dragonwriter 9y ago
          Android Browser wasn't Chrome on Android.
        • izacus 9y ago
• 0003 9y ago
  So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that hate it.
  • mthoms 9y ago
    > more $ for publishers I'm curious... What are you basing this on? Is this proven? Besides, do you really think short term cash is the only thing that publishers should optimize for?
    • adyavanapalli 9y ago
      I think google, which you can google ;), published a study showing that users are more likely to stay on a webpage if it loads under some threshold time. And if this is the case, users are more likely read the content and see the ads on said webpage. Hence, more $$$ for publishers.
      • mthoms 9y ago
        But AMP doesn't allow traditional ads right? Only Google-approved ones. So, how are you going to monetize? Google ads of course. Don't you think it's a funny coincidence that this project to "speed up the web" also results in giving more ad revenue to Google?
  • MBCook 9y ago
    Have you been to Daring Fireball? It's one of the fastest loading pages on the whole Internet because it's not crapped up with lots of stuff. Gruber's site is proof you don't need AMP to have fast loads. I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw steep declines in revenue?
    • tjl 9y ago
      I can't imagine that AMP would load much faster that the current Daring Fireball design. If it's faster, I would probably guess that it's just the different routes between the AMP cache on Google and Daring Fireball's host. But, DF isn't using AMP. I seem to recall that publishers who used the Facebook version saw a decline in revenue, so I think you're right about that point. I don't know about AMP, though.
• dreamcompiler 9y ago
  AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP does indeed need to die in a very hot fire. And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Bing works fine. The more people use them, the better they'll get. DuckDuckGo mostly feeds off other engines, but is also good. I personally don't really recommend StartPage because you can't get away from Google's opinionated ranking on a site that provides Google results. But in short, use other search engines and they'll get better. Stop giving Google your search behavior, it's what they use to keep themselves on top.
    • tytso 9y ago
      You realize Bing supports AMP and has an AMP cache as well, right? And if you use DDG, you're effectively using Bing. BTW, Cloudflare has an AMP cache as well....
      • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        I am aware Bing also supports AMP, but reducing Google's dominance in search data is key on preventing them from determining web design going forward. DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source and can be contributed to.
  • biocomputation 9y ago
    Bing user here. I switched a few years ago when I finally got sick enough of Google's many creepy abuses of power. It's just as good. As others have noted, Google's search is only good when you're signed in. Because they use all that data to personalize the results.
• timelol 9y ago
  It's pretty silly to say "fix your fucking website". The utility of AMP is that it provides a tool for publishers who are ready to admit that they are powerless over javascript. Basically these publishers are ready to say that they are too stupid to run web sites, and they need the help of an outside party. If the publishers had any ability, sense, or taste then we wouldn't need AMP at all. If I go to the Chicago Tribune's own site my computer will burst into flames. So I actually don't visit it, and I've got it shitlisted in /etc/hosts so that I never do by accident. But I am happy to read their content via AMP on my phone. It's fast and my phone doesn't get hot and I don't get a $1000 mobile bill.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• hannob 9y ago
  Here's your one step recipe to kill AMP: * Build fast webpages. The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish over the years.
  • callahad 9y ago
    Building fast webpages won't get you preferential placement in Google search results.
    • WorkLobster 9y ago
      Unless I'm missing something, it does: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
      • callahad 9y ago
        You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories" carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate, flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc. For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only two aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested only by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories also appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7. So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.
        • WorkLobster 9y ago
          Ah, yeah. Truth be told I realised after hitting 'send' that you may have meant that. This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.
• tomduncalf 9y ago
  AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it - if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!
  • mort96 9y ago
    Google's broken AMP crap is what made me switch to duckduckgo on iOS.
    • ihsw2 9y ago
      It seems to me that only iOS users are complaining -- as an Android user I am blown away by how readable AMP pages are. I can just get to the page, read it, and then leave. There's no futzing around with: * long scrolling down "the fold" filled with clickbait in-site links or other unrelated nonsense * interstitial and overlay ads * crappy non-mobile interfaces * "Shared" buttons stickied to the bottom or top of the viewframe There's still ads around the page (in-content ads between paragraphs and "you may like" or "recommended" ads at the bottom of the page) and navigational elements to browse outside of the AMP page. It's the mobile content consumption experience as it should be.
      • protomyth 9y ago
        Yes, the people who don't own a phone OS by Google are complaining about Google's AMP. That is part of the problem.
  • makecheck 9y ago
    A way to disable it while seeing Google results is to start from DuckDuckGo but add "g!". This goes through a different Google interface that always returns normal links.
    • grzm 9y ago
• d-sc 9y ago
  I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a single article.
  • CaptSpify 9y ago
    And that's valid. The problem AMP is trying to solve is absolutely real, but the way they are trying to solve it is shady.
• manigandham 9y ago
  HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to make sites faster. AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy. Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.
  • pdimitar 9y ago
    I am on your side -- just chiming in to share my observations. To 99% of the businesses I worked with, software development is a singular expense. It's treated like buying a tractor for the farm. Hell, even farming equipment is more generously funded by the buyers for possible future expenses (compared to most software development) -- maintenance, repairs, parts that periodically need replacement, fuel. For one reason or another, most businesses treat software development like buying a socket wrench from the local store and never even thinking of spending another penny on the developed product in the future. They expect it to run perfectly forever. It's a sad state of affairs.
    • manigandham 9y ago
      That only makes AMP worse. Many publishers are already squeezed with dev resources, the last thing they need is yet another standard to support instead of putting that time towards the original HTML that is universally available to all users and devices.
      • pdimitar 9y ago
        Absolutely. You know, in a perverse way of seeing at it, I kind of feel good that Google forces AMP; they are like "Hah, you all stupid motherduckers couldn't get your own crap together for 15 years, guess it's time for you to be ruled, if you can't make use of your freedom". If you look at it that way, it makes sense. Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together indeed. One can dream, right?
• niftich 9y ago
  The complaint about AMP's strange UX paradigms is valid: it works very hard to pretend like every AMP article is a standalone website, but it actually behaves like a viewport-wrapping iframe, where Google Search is on the outside and the article is on the inside [1]. But it's not a personal affront to iOS; it's more of an artifact of Google's confusing market strategy and conflicting requirements for AMP's deployment: pretend like AMP pages are real browser-resident tabs, while actually driving traffic around within the confines of Google Search (vs. outside) when possible. As much as I don't care for their strategy, I respect needing to balance conflicting requirements. They should scrap the dishonest UX and be up-front about what they are, as I write [1]. But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound. Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened, and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game between two massive content aggregation portals. Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels about that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073
  • jeffbax 9y ago
    Is Apple news more than a feed spec like RSS / is the content hosted by Apple directly, like how AMP pages actually live on google.com?
    • tjl 9y ago
      Apple News is really just RSS. I think Gruber's Daring Fireball stuff in Apple News just comes from his RSS feed. It's all hosted on your servers, so it's basically just a specialized browser.
• smacktoward 9y ago
  The only reason AMP is even viable is because the current alternatives are even worse. Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that user experience matters. Just about every major online publication is painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript, and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table. So the economic incentive for change is not there. AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a death spiral, and in that situation any idea that seems to offer a way out is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP. The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.
• grizzles 9y ago
  A competing decentralized implementation if anyone is keen to pitch in: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534
• bozonil 9y ago
  Do you remember the time when slow webpages with megabytes of ads in popups/iframes were killing the web? When almost every webpage was trying to get you install their half-baked mobile apps? AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.
• namuol 9y ago
  > Google has no respect for [iOS Safari]. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web. I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning: http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream ...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_ platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors and web developers alike. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
  • amelius 9y ago
    But also: sheer overwhelming difficulty + no incentive = no action
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• evolve2k 9y ago
  "it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view" Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?
  • duskwuff 9y ago
    Tap the status bar -- the bit at the very top with the time, your battery level, and whatnot. As Gruber mentions, this works on almost anything that scrolls vertically, not just the browser.
  • tlrobinson 9y ago
    Double tap. I think it only works with one tap if the address bar is already open.
    • MBCook 9y ago
      No, it's a single tap on the status bar (where the clock is). It works almost anywhere in iOS there's a long scrolling thing.
      • tlrobinson 9y ago
        No, in Mobile Safari if the address bar isn't visible you have to tap twice, once to show the address bar and once to scroll to the top. It is a single tap in most other apps though.
        • MBCook 9y ago
          Oh, ok, I get you now.
• pducks32 9y ago
  I honestly would support Apple or Mozilla from refusing to render AMP pages. I use DuckDuckGo on Safari so don't have to deal with it thankfully.
  • SquareWheel 9y ago
    AMP is built on open HTML5 standards. What you're suggesting is that Apple and Mozilla intentionally stop supporting the open web.
• twsted 9y ago
  Yes, of course. Just as we are killing publishing on Facebook, right?
• cbsmith 9y ago
  I gotta say, this mostly seems like an attack on the implementation of AMP in Safari than it is on AMP itself.
• cramforce 9y ago
  With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling. Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
  • cramforce 9y ago
    On top of this: we currently have a team working to fix webkit bugs that are problematic for AMP. This, of course, will make webkit better for everyone.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • jkezfvjnawu 9y ago
      Awesome, let's hack webkit so that our hack of a product works.
    • ehed 9y ago
      Can you team also work on a way to let people opt-out of Google AMP?
    • ghughes 9y ago
      Are you going to fix this? https://amphtml.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/image1.png https://amphtml.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/image1.png
  • MBCook 9y ago
    The snark at the end seems very unwarranted.
    • cramforce 9y ago
      Sorry, but there is some irony there. We were as surprised as anyone. I do like the new inertia much better. Allows for much faster scrolling similar to Android.
• Sephr 9y ago
  I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN. If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.
• meow_mix 9y ago
  I'm honestly just too scared that Google would gain an even larger foothold in the web to consider implementing AMP on any sites, but the UX argument is valid as well
• merraksh 9y ago
  Original Register link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
  • sctb 9y ago
    Thanks! We updated the link from https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp.
• theclaw 9y ago
  Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail" and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling. This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    Too little for me. I still can't easily copy that URL, and there's no way to opt out of it. Instead of fixing their complete break to the way with the web works, they put in a little tiny patch and clean it's just as good.
    • theclaw 9y ago
      If you're on iOS You can copy it by long-touching the URL that pops up when you touch the link icon.
      • MBCook 9y ago
        You can now (although that's still different from any other site). I'm pretty sure that was only added a few months ago and when it was first released you couldn't easily copy the URL.
• xbmcuser 9y ago
  The problem he is seeing is with safari rendering rather than amp itself. He should ask Apple to fix that.
• pjbrunet 9y ago
  I suspect whoever made that executive decision at Google to use "AMP" was too young to remember Frontpage and so many years fighting with MSIE. How soon we forget. AMP is bad news. Keep your hands off my design. It's not your Internet, Google. PS: I'm on Linux, not an Apple fanboy :-D
• 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
  Can someone explain How is this killing the open web? Isn't this an open standard?
  • ninkendo 9y ago
    It's not the standard, it's what google does to amp sites: re-hosts them on their own site so your site is now (essentially) google.com/yoursite.com. AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors, ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search results). The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP, while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online, widening their competitive moat, etc. It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.
    • ihsw2 9y ago
      But it's entirely opt-in -- how is this controversial?
      • ninkendo 9y ago
        Because users seeing AMP links as faster will pressure more sites to do it. Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using bloated javascript, they're fast because: - The JS that is used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites - You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc - Google's servers/networking/etc stack is very fast, faster than what is in reach of most sites - The new content is loaded into the existing DOM of the search page, which can be much faster And probably the most damning: - Google will eagerly-load the contents of the first few results, making them not just fast but 100% instant. What choice do sites have?
• fghafoor 9y ago
  As a web developer I have AMP but as a user I love it! Websites have been so bloated that something like this was badly needed. People loading just 100-200 kbs of fonts to serve 10kb of original content.
  • omgtehlion 9y ago
    Okay, I know of a website that loads almost 2MB of javascript to show you 140 bytes of actual content.
• taurath 9y ago
  Google news has a bug on iOS safari for me that makes it just load the header - it's actually cut back a lot on my idle news consumption - please don't fix!
• dshep 9y ago
  Is this why Google News on mobile is so terrible? Feels like using an android news app inside of Safari. Thumbs down.
• coolziro 9y ago
  Hi
• randyrand 9y ago
  talk about being over-dramatic
• kazinator 9y ago
  Are they serious with the following? AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character: <html > ^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo. Just, no, Google. You're not Ken fucking Iverson, and this is not APL. Just supporting one way of doing it, <html amp>, is perfectly fine.
  • emmelaich 9y ago
    I suppose they do this because some html processors do stupid things with `amp` - because it might be part of the ampersand html entity.
• kuon 9y ago
  What is AMP? EDIT: I mean technically, not what the acronym means.
  • ihsw2 9y ago
    Per the specification: > AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics. Source: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec Basically you have your website serve up your content within a subset of HTML so that your pages have to load faster. JavaScript is permitted but with limited functionality (again, the intent is your website loads quickly). Also, Google will host your webpage on their servers after crawling your website. When a user clicks on an AMP link from Google's search results, the content will be served up from Google's servers and thus the page will load much faster.
• consultSKI 9y ago
  Love my duckduckgo
• Pxtl 9y ago
  Honestly? I've come to loathe the abysmal performance of the modern web so much that I'm ready to accept AMP. Half the reason I come to hacker News is that the site runs fast. And half the reason I comment before reading the article is because it doesn't.
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    I often comment without reading the articles because on an older device it's impossible. 90% of links will just crash the browser in 10 seconds. I can watch an hour long youtube video just fine, but trying to load a newspaper article will make it keel over and die. Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I like doing that.
    • qb45 9y ago
      There are extensions which add buttons to quickly enable/disable JS on per-site basis like NoScript for Firefox. Also, Firefox reader view fixes many websites which otherwise render empty with JS disabled for reasons I didn't bother investigating.
      • Houshalter 9y ago
        I don't think it's possible to get browser extensions on an old iOS device.
        • qb45 9y ago
          Fair enough, I didn't realize you meant iOS devices.
• thro1111111 9y ago
  Jokes on google, AMP sites always crash on my old iphone 4s (the one I use for mindless browsing), so I just avoid AMP content
• winteriscoming 9y ago
  What's going to be interesting is if browsers can at some point render a APM version of a page natively. What I mean is render the original page on the source website as APM content. That will stop the monopoly and hijacking (or rather the rationalization of it) of target websites in Google results.
  • winteriscoming 9y ago
    Or as a start, maybe a browser extension/plugin where it renders it for certain configured sites.
• fenomas 9y ago
  What kills me about AMP's UX is that not only is it a dark pattern, it's not even a new dark pattern. Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.
  • ihsw2 9y ago
    How is this a dark pattern? Sites opt into it, users get a streamlined interface for content consumption, everybody wins. The only losers in this are those seeking to "curate" the user experience (UX) on their sites, and personally I lump them in with malicious ad peddlers -- to hell with them.
    • acdha 9y ago
      Sites opt-in under heavy pressure that they'll lost placement if they don't. Users lose the ability to get the normal site rather than the AMP version when browsing on mobile devices.
    • protomyth 9y ago
      It is the same opt-in as mob protection: "nice search results you have there, be a shame if something dropped you to page 2"
      • ihsw2 9y ago
        The only way that would be accurate is if Google targeted content creators randomly for rent seeking, but the fact of the matter is Google has a vested interest in making sure their search results are compellingly useful to users. Personally I'm using Google search more because AMP makes things faster for me. It's a win-win for me.
    • fenomas 9y ago
      Sites opt in to preferential search placement. That's orthogonal to injecting a header over outgoing links being a dark UX pattern.
• relics443 9y ago
  As a user, I love AMP. Pages load fast, and that's about all I really care about. I don't really do web dev anymore, but if I was I think I'd be happy about using it. Maybe a content creator feels differently but I don't have any experience with that.
• urda 9y ago
  This, coupled with the common anthem from the tech crowd of using Chrome and only Chrome is a dangerous precedent. Stop supporting AMP, and use something other than Google Search and Chrome today.
• wcr3 9y ago
  i agree that AMP is troubling for a variety of reasons - none of which, however, change the fact that the author of this article is unquestionably a Weenie.
• gwu78 9y ago
  Long before amp, Google began prefixing search result urls with "google.tld?url=" and adding Google parameters as suffixes such as "sa=", "ved=", etc. Unless I am mistaken this parasitic cruft only serves Google, not end users. Below is quick and dirty program to filter out the above. Replace .com with .cctld as needed. Requirements: cc, lex Usage: curl -o 1.htm https://www.google.com/search?q=xyz yyg < 1.htm > 2.htm your-ad-supported-web-browser 2.htm To compile this I use something like flex -Crfa -8 -i g.l; cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yyg; Save text below as file g.l Then compile as above. %% [^\12\40-\176] \/url[?]q= "http://www.google.com/gwt\/x?hl=en&amp;u=" "&amp;"[^\"]* %% main(){yylex();} yywrap(){} As for amp, I read that it needs to use iframes (and Javascript). Yikes. We can easily write a program to strip out iframe targets as well as links to Javascript. amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes automatically.
  • SomewhatLikely 9y ago
    It's really annoying trying to copy and paste URLs from Google results. It also seems largely unnecessary, can't they detect clicks using javascript? I have noticed they have started doing this with links sent through Google Hangouts messages as well. I do remember a time when they weren't doing this and it was very refreshing because everyone else was.
• alphagrowth 9y ago
  Hate it or love it if you are a content producer and want to compete in SEO you have to AMP.
• martin1975 9y ago
  When does that bloody pagerank patent expire anyway? Maybe we can see slightly better quality on other major search engines if they used the same algorithm Google "invented"
• bikamonki 9y ago
  AMP was born dead no need to kill it. As the webmaster of many websites, the last time I heard customers complain about rankings in SRPs was ten years ago. Their main concern nowadays is likes, follows and shares. I keep telling them: put some effort on your website, own your audience, you do not own your FB page much less the fans and likes there. They don't listen. Trapped in the hype. In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content (same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do not care? Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 9y ago
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• hornetblack 9y ago
  > it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view Is that what was happening. It just felt like scroll was spazzing out. Usually I was just trying to push a button near the top of the screen.
• Animats 9y ago
  There are worse things than AMP. "Wix" sites, for one. 20 seconds to load a page where all the useful info is static.
• J5892 9y ago
  On our site, we just load AMP as a base experience, and load our other stuff on top of it if it's not served in the AMP browser. So we get the initial render speed of AMP, along with the SEO advantages, and can still implement features not supported by AMP for the majority of our users.
• WhiteSource1 9y ago
  From the publisher side does anyone have data on AMP's impact on search rankings (to the original publisher - not Google :-))
• golergka 9y ago
  It took 8 seconds, 1.7 Mb of data and 233 requests to load this article. May be a web like this deserves to be killed.
• sammyh 9y ago
  I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyday user the only interesting part is the content. Not the ads, not the comments, especially not the page layout and hopefully not the links to other "You never believe what X things about Y" articles across 10 X different page loads. AMP for web articles may die as publishers try to remain more independent or relevant in other forums (snapchat, instagram stories, facebook live etc.) but the idea of fast and simple mobile pages should remain. For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.
  • eponeponepon 9y ago
    > How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?
    • sammyh 9y ago
      Freedom would be to choose whether format you like. Web is anything but that as every developer and user has to rely on set of rules and software to be able to communicate and access it. In practice most of us have zero power on the system itself. Someone else (businesses and organizations funded by businesses, developers working in such organizations) have the power to control how the web works. At the moment google yields much of the such power as does facebook, amazon, twitter, apple and others. Truthfully I see the whole internet today as a business enterprise that as a side effect allows everyone to share their everything. Internet as we know it will never be free and thats probably part of the reason why there has been a movement to "fix the internet" (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creat...) Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they think you want. The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the government than in any other place in the world.
• MichaelBurge 9y ago
  > Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google. What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues? It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec "While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals." Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.
• smagch 9y ago
  I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume AMP. Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution. AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.
• cbhl 9y ago
  Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on mobile. The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone). I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.
• thr0waway1239 9y ago
  I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore. "Oh, we open source it, you know", seems the common answer. If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative. Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies. There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business. But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.
• limeblack 9y ago
  I'm not sure when there is going to end up but because google amp is hosted on google servers you can actually read such articles on GoGo plane flights with out paying for Internet. It was kinda nice although I'm not sure how long until this will be fixed.
• Aissen 9y ago
  News websites dug their own graves. AMP is a solution to a simple problem: the inability for websites to reach acceptable perf levels. For users, AMP is a blessing. It even improves the ad situation a bit (no more perf impact).
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]