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Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolli

Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages." You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.

MBCook 9y ago
AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea. Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top. I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results. Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off. I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.
- izacus 9y ago
  > AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up. It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved. All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect. This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.
    - danso 9y ago
      > If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this. To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites? The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful. Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python". Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got. It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - MBCook 9y ago
      See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560 You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them. I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there. That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.
      - vesinisa 9y ago
        > It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!) Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor. Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.
- Deimorz 9y ago
  They said AMP outputs HTML5, not outperforms it.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Oh. I guess I just read it that way because I'm used to people saying that AMP is much faster than HTML five (and given a horribly bloated page it is).
  - coldtea 9y ago
    What else would it output? Obviously its not a third party native plugin, so it should output some kind of HTML5 content to play in browsers, even if it was just a canvas view.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.
  - karlshea 9y ago
    I use it constantly, it works across almost all apps in iOS.
  - jeffbax 9y ago
    Its literally the behavior for 99% of scroll bars across iOS. I don't know how you made it this far without it, it's in almost every application.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      It's not something developers have to implement so only if you are rolling your own UIScrollView/UITableView components would you have to worry about it. Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere. iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS. Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed. Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.
    - tedmiston 9y ago
      Another nice gesture that's lesser known is hold down on the left side of the screen in any app then drag to the right to open the app switcher.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  "Horribly designed and ridiculously bloated" describes the majority of popular websites. If companies won't fix their shit, somebody else will come along and do it for them.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Or Google do things the right way, ad could start punishing them instead. Google pushes those to the top of results, and then sweeps in to fix the "problem" that they created
- cramforce 9y ago
  AMP is HTML5, so by definition it cannot outperform it. It is just the web. That is a feature.
- obstinate 9y ago
  > AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
delinka 9y ago
"...it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it." Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.
- cramforce 9y ago
  See comment below. Soon all pages will scroll like AMP. It is just overflow scrolling, and Apple decided to make that the standard.
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 :)
gommm 9y ago
I actually had never noticed that it was possible to scroll with AMP because it's different from the way it normally should work. So, yes I think the scrolling issue is a real issue. So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.

MBCook 9y ago

AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea. Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top. I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results. Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off. I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.

izacus 9y ago
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
- MBCook 9y ago
  If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up. It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved. All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect. This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.
  - danso 9y ago
    > If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this. To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites? The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful. Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python". Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got. It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - MBCook 9y ago
    See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560 You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them. I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there. That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.
    - vesinisa 9y ago
      > It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!) Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor. Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.
Deimorz 9y ago
They said AMP outputs HTML5, not outperforms it.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Oh. I guess I just read it that way because I'm used to people saying that AMP is much faster than HTML five (and given a horribly bloated page it is).
- coldtea 9y ago
  What else would it output? Obviously its not a third party native plugin, so it should output some kind of HTML5 content to play in browsers, even if it was just a canvas view.
dyarosla 9y ago
I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.
- karlshea 9y ago
  I use it constantly, it works across almost all apps in iOS.
- jeffbax 9y ago
  Its literally the behavior for 99% of scroll bars across iOS. I don't know how you made it this far without it, it's in almost every application.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    It's not something developers have to implement so only if you are rolling your own UIScrollView/UITableView components would you have to worry about it. Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.
- MBCook 9y ago
  It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere. iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS. Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed. Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    Another nice gesture that's lesser known is hold down on the left side of the screen in any app then drag to the right to open the app switcher.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
"Horribly designed and ridiculously bloated" describes the majority of popular websites. If companies won't fix their shit, somebody else will come along and do it for them.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Or Google do things the right way, ad could start punishing them instead. Google pushes those to the top of results, and then sweeps in to fix the "problem" that they created
cramforce 9y ago
AMP is HTML5, so by definition it cannot outperform it. It is just the web. That is a feature.
obstinate 9y ago
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

delinka 9y ago

"...it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it." Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.

cramforce 9y ago
See comment below. Soon all pages will scroll like AMP. It is just overflow scrolling, and Apple decided to make that the standard.

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 :)

gommm 9y ago

I actually had never noticed that it was possible to scroll with AMP because it's different from the way it normally should work. So, yes I think the scrolling issue is a real issue. So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.