21 ms·

I decided to disable AMP on my site

665 points by akras14 9y ago

romanovcode 9y ago
The fact that website content is stored on Google servers and being served from Google is just disgusting.
- sofaofthedamned 9y ago
  Not all of it is. Most i've seen recently have a /amp/ subdir on the correct domain, not Google.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    That's just the publisher putting AMP versions on a different URL, Google's still going to cache it and serve it from its own.
- parenthephobia 9y ago
  Is hosting your site on Google Cloud Platform equally disgusting?
  - kennydude 9y ago
    AMP forces it, GCP is a choice
    - parenthephobia 9y ago
      AMP is a choice. Otherwise, this article wouldn't have been written!
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Yes, it is technically a choice. But since Google abuses their search monopoly to coerce people to start using AMP it is not a free choice any more. There is a price to pay for not using AMP and that price has nothing to do with your users.
      - mthoms 9y ago
        As a user, can you please show me how I can opt out of AMP?
- briandear 9y ago
  So don’t search with Google and it won’t affect you.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Giving you free hosting all across the world, much closer to your users, is disgusting? Unless you're hosting a webserver on your computer, your server is most likely being hosted in the cloud somewhere (aka some random computer somewhere in the world). How is it being on a Google server, instead of company X's server, suddenly disgusting?
  - int_19h 9y ago
    Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.
    - Gigablah 9y ago
      So how about other CDNs like Cloudflare?
      - LunaSea 9y ago
        Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.
        ehsankia 9y ago
        You do have the choice... The only part that forces you to use Google's cache is to get on their search carousel, but other than that, you can still use AMP and not their cache.
        callumlocke 9y ago
        If your competitors are doing it, and you want to survive, you don't have a choice.
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      By that logic, does AWS have huge amount of power? Why does it matter what server the content is hosted on? Aren't almost all websites hosted on a remote server? The only difference is Google gets to choose what shows up on their search, and they always had that control anyway.
xbmcuser 9y ago
Amp was the reply to Facebook articles the problem was because Facebook pages loaded faster more people were posting and sharing Facebook pages which is worse than Google Amp.
- vog 9y ago
  This is an interesting thought. Do you have any sources to back this up?
- bartl 9y ago
  I think people share Facebook pages because they found the content on Facebook. Speed has nothing to do with it.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Back when FB release FB Instant, it increased my engagement with shared links significantly. Usually, on a phone browser, the thought of clicking on a link which would navigate away from the app and load a heavy full-fledged website would make me not want to click on shared links at all. But with the lightning symbol next to Instant-supported links? Click right away. In the worst case, if the content is bad, you will back where you were in a second.
boramalper 9y ago
The author has some very valid points against AMP from a technical standpoint, but for me there is a single reason that is sufficient: the Web is, and should stay, free and open. Indeed, I'm having really hard time trying to understand how people can be fine with AMP while fighting for the net neutrality and so on.
- chris__butters 9y ago
  Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its private and only fb knows it.
    - boramalper 9y ago
      I am not saying exactly that Google is evil, and maybe they don't even have bad intentions (heck, we are talking about a corporate identity here, how far can we apply morals?). But, what I am thinking is that AMP and its rivals (such as Instant Articles) hurt the free & open Web. For instance, Google Search is invaluable, but as a side effect, a website that doesn't end up on the first page of a Google Search result for instance, is nearly non-existent. Also, the notion of hyperlinks are crucial to the Web and these projects break it. Hyperlinks originate from an article from 1945, "As We May Think"[1], and the term itself is coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 for Project Xanadu. That's how you create a web that is now called the Web. That's also what Google's PageRank algorithm depends on, at least at the beginning. Now, letting Google host your content, under a link such as `https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html` https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html`, you are breaking hyperlinks: it is no more linking different websites together. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
gizmo 9y ago
AMP is bad and should be resisted. It is an attack on the distributed nature of the web. The web is slow because every page of text comes with megabytes of javascript cruft to spy on users and serve ads. The solution is to make web pages that don't suck. AMP puts even more power in the hands of Google. Just say no.
mehmetkose 9y ago
Google like big pacman, and eating the web
k__ 9y ago
AMP somehow doesn't work right on my smartphone. When I go to news.google.com an click of any of the AMP links on the front page, I always get thrown back to news.google.com when I scroll on the AMP page.
- dv35z 9y ago
  And frustratingly, you can't background-open AMP links from Google News. Instead, AMP articles open wuth their own (annoying) navigation, where swiping goes a completely different article.
runn1ng 9y ago
Funny thing is - I, as a reader, love AMP sites. If a website offers AMP, I will prefer it from normal thing. It has less ads, less bloat, better signal/noise ratio, and the AMP websites look pleasant to eye. So I prefer them even on desktop, ironically. I still have the issues with Google's AMP caching. But AMP itself is great.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  You can use Firefox and have 0 ads with uBlock Origin.
  - runn1ng 9y ago
    AMP sites still look better. I am using this simple extension that shows me when a website has AMP version and I switch to it (not sure if there is an extension that does this automatically). Doesn't work 100% though https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amplifier-ampcanonical-sw/ennckgigejppolagdoadgaaodkhopjnb/related?hl=cs https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amplifier-ampcanon... edit: oh, this one seems to do it automatically. Nice https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F-desktop-amp/igokgmnkplcfgnegidccbgmlnecaffhh/related https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F...
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      The problem that the tech to make any page look like an amp page existed long before amp. But Google, rather than heavily penalising heavy websites decided to push AMP. They could have just pushed for normal HTML but no, now everybody has to write two versions of the pages. (Granted, à cms can handle generating AMP alongside RSS and so on)
      - runn1ng 9y ago
        Yeah, everyone can do non-bloated websites that load fast and look good, but nobody does. Market doesn't value those? I don't know. AMP is a good idea, unfortunately it needs strong actors like Google or Twitter to push it.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. Safari actually has an inconsistent scrolling speed compared to the rest of the OS. iOS 11 makes all Safari pages scroll at the same speed as AMP sites (-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch) Also important distinction for people to remember - AMP is two products: - CDN with preloading pages in Google Search results - Framework/guidelines for building performant results The 'morals' and impacts to the 'free and open web' of these two are completely different.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Re: two products, I realized this but never really thought about it. Can one self-host an AMP (framework) implementation? Does Google still promote such content, even if it isn't part of their CDN?
  - kennydude 9y ago
    It could be re-implemented, it's just "web components" last I looked
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Sure. It's just a stricter subset of HTML and a JS library for custom components. Self host it. No, Google won't give you the special AMP-bolt - nor should they because they can't provide the instant load as they can for other AMP sites that they self-host on their CDN.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      That's where I have trouble accepting AMP. I love the concept and Google's support would be huge, but Google doesn't seem to be truly promoting making the mobile web better with AMP. They are promoting making the mobile web better with their CDN (i.e. by centralizing/controlling the content).
  - dangoldin 9y ago
    I actually converted my blog (http://dangoldin.com/ http://dangoldin.com/) a while back to be entirely in AMP. In this way I'm using the framework without caring about the CDN element. After reading this I may just bite the bullet and remove AMP and just cut out a bunch of crap to get it optimized for lower bandwidth devices.
pavement 9y ago
AMP has all the charisma of Silverlight. When I see it, I am impelled away from it, and toward anything closer to normal, no matter how ugly or slow.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
torrent-of-ions 9y ago
In the 90s web pages loaded instantly. Now we have faster computers and faster networks, but apparently we need something like AMP to make the web fast. We have regressed.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Those are some extremely rose colored glasses you are wearing if you think web pages loaded instantly in the 90's I remember using the web on a 56k modem (which was pretty damn fast!) and waiting 30+ seconds for pages to fully load.
  - tdy721 9y ago
    The text was still fast. And I NEVER saw had the text disappear for a second while the page updated the font... The text was still fast, and the developers assumed you had a crappy modem in at least 80% of cases. The web is getting slower.
  - torrent-of-ions 9y ago
    Of course 56k was slow. It's 56k. But if you ever used a faster line in the 90s it was virtually instant. Everyone has those faster lines now, but it's never instant.
- klibertp 9y ago
  We've lived through different 90s then. Most of my early porn was loading for ages, first appearing partially, then slowly loading the rest, to finally display a 600x400 (full screen!) image. Well, I was rather young then, so one image was often enough, and the waiting time made it all the more... satisfying, but it sure as hell wasn't "loaded instantly" :)
  - torrent-of-ions 9y ago
    I'm not talking about downloading images. I'm talking about web pages that contain information. Reading news, recipes etc.
TekMol 9y ago
To me, AMP is the same wallet garden that Facebook is. Google and Facebook both say: "Give us your content. But without the crap. Just the content. Since we don't allow crap, users prefer the experience over here. So your content will have more readers then on your own domain.". And for some reason publishers are crazy enough to do that. Instead of removing the crap on their own domains in the first place.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  you are forced to login to FB, is the same true with AMP?
  - TekMol 9y ago
    Whatever Google wants you to do to access the content. Once it is on their domain, they have full control over it.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      so, do you need to log on to access AMPs content?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - jhasse 9y ago
        Not yet.
        type0 9y ago
        What a relief.
    - Ajedi32 9y ago
      It's not on their domain though. Or at least, it's not _only_ on their domain. Google is just caching content served from the publisher's domain; you can access that content just fine without going through Google.
kennydude 9y ago
> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Thought it felt wrong. Makes me want to use Google less and less
notfitforwrk 9y ago
Don't be evil. Just a little is fine. No one will notice. Go on then!
RKearney 9y ago
> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Oddly enough Apple is changing the scrolling behavior in Safari for iOS 11 to scroll how the amp pages do. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-coming-to-mobile-safari/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-comin...
javindo 9y ago
I have a visual impairment and one of the things I love about Chrome on Android is the ability to override sites blocking pinch to zoom (i.e. "force enable pinch to zoom"). AMP, also made by Google, seems to somehow get around this browser setting, making AMP sites unreadable and therefore completely useless to me. Why does Google have these obvious discrepancies between their own products?
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  Google's approach to design has always seemed to be to wall off a bunch of teams in separate soundproof rooms with no communication with each other, meetings, or contact with the outside world. Also they're only allowed to use iPhones. This is the only way I can imagine we ended up with 437 different messaging apps and counting, and the problem you described.
  - fgandiya 9y ago
    > Also they're only allowed to use iPhones Why is that? Seems a bit ironic...
    - marcuslager 9y ago
      Hey fella. U alright? You seeem a bit sarcastic.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  AMP with Chrome on Android also breaks the back button on many (all) sites? If you pass through several links within a site, then hit back, Google will forget all that and dump you back to search results. Disable AMP and the problem goes away.
jacquesm 9y ago
Why would anybody enable it to begin with? There is absolutely no reason for sites such as the one linked here to have AMP enabled. It's a pox on the web and Google has enough power as it is. The sooner AMP dies the better. If you want your site to load faster get rid of the cruft.
- jononor 9y ago
  Because Google promises you higher ranking in search results...
  - tdy721 9y ago
    However, this is still true if you get rid of the cruft
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      Not strictly - apparently the top carousel of results actually mandate AMP.
- joeblau 9y ago
  I enabled it on https://www.gitignore.io https://www.gitignore.io a few months ago because it suggested that it would improve my mobile users experience. After posts like these, I think it's time to take it back down.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Only an anecdote, but AMP trashes my mobile experience. Using Chrome on Android (so it ought to be good...) it rewrites back-button functionality, so that even after I've changed through 5 different pages, a single 'back' press takes me all the way off the site to Google search results. It also eats a bunch of screen real estate with the AMP bar for longer than the normal address bar.
omnifischer 9y ago
@alexkras Sorry this comes from me in Nigeria using a second-hand MotoG (1.Gen). May be your website is not loading 23 trackers + unnecessary js. But many websites, load such crap. Please especially in third-world, we have so poor phones. Only google-CDN avoids all these. (yes, google does track me but we do not all have unlimited bandwidth).
- niutech 9y ago
  Hey, would you like to try the brand new AMP Browser? It should help when the Internet connection on your PC is poor: http://ampbrowser.com http://ampbrowser.com
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > try the brand new AMP Browser? I'm only seeing a Windows build on the website. Doesn't help OP much when they have a phone: "Please especially in third-world, we have so poor phones." I don't know if you've been to Africa, but PCs are not common there unless you're working in a company. Depending on where you are, a small portion of the population has personal laptops. Otherwise feature phones or smartphones are the best people have. So linking to a Windows-only application for someone who lives in a developing country and only lists a cellphone may not be very applicable to them.
- jbreckmckye 9y ago
  Low-power phones in developing nations were exactly the platform we targeted when implementing _The Guardian_, and I would advise every seriously global publisher to do the same.
  - omnifischer 9y ago
    even amp.guardian page has 33 requests (677kB) whereas cdn.ampproject.org has 4 requests (124kB). Try this: https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-means-brexit-review-political-farce-terrifying-implications https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.thegu... or https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-means-brexit-review-political-farce-terrifying-implications https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-... Are you from Guardian?
ilmiont 9y ago
Good! I stand firmly against AMP and the centralisation of the web, it's a predatory move to increase Google's prevalence online, and one I will not be supporting with any of my upcoming projects.
- mondoshawan 9y ago
  You remember Akamai, right? AMP is just another CDN. Back in the 90s, when Akamai was fighting to establish themselves, you'd see tons of fetches from hosts like a123.d.akamai.com on big name properties like CNN. Nowadays it's pretty much hidden, and pervasive. Google is attempting to entrench a reverse proxy cache the same way Akamai has for years. AMP is nothing new. The only difference here is that they make it obvious you're using a CDN, whereas Akamai is almost completely transparent and runs close to 80-90% of the traffic of the "open" web -- you just don't know about it.
  - mkj 9y ago
    No, akamai didn't change page layout/content.
    - brians 9y ago
      https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/front-end-optimization-feo.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/front-end-optimizatio... Opt-in by the publisher, of course.
  - LunaSea 9y ago
    Yeah but Akamai is optional. Google's CDN / cache in AMP isn't. Big difference.
    - Gigablah 9y ago
      How is Akamai optional for a user? If you're saying that it's optional for publishers, then your argument doesn't make sense since AMP is optional for publishers as well (I mean, the author disabled it and all).
dayjah 9y ago
There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G speeds while roaming somehow, which is resulting in me seeing a lot of butchered pages. As the author mentions: > AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I’ve seen it fail fairly regularly, leaving the article with an empty white square instead of the image. Text content is very fast, but images either don't load or partially load making the reading experience pretty poor.
- jsnell 9y ago
  You're saying that AMP doesn't help with slow connections, based on AMP not loading all resources on 2G. But you're missing the data point for non-AMP pages on 2G. Are you sure it's not even worse? It's hard to believe how bloated many modern websites are, before trying to load them over 2G. We're talking megabytes of data and tens of connections to display what should be a 20kB of text.
  - corobo 9y ago
    If a regular page doesn't load on a 2G connection and an AMP page doesn't load on a 2G connection.. what's the point of AMP?
  - acdha 9y ago
    AMP puts 100KB of JavaScript in the initial render path, and a bunch of CSS. That doesn't mean that other sites cannot be worse but it means that there's no way to make an AMP page which doesn't require transferring at least that much data. I notice this fairly regularly in marginal network coverage (subway tunnels/platforms) where AMP pages load no faster than any well-optimized site unless the stars are aligned and you actually get a cache hit.
    - niutech 9y ago
      Keep in mind that this AMP JS library is being loaded from the CDN only once for all AMP pages, then cached in the browser.
pokermike 9y ago
The author is dead-on. I wish more publishers would resist and stop supporting AMP. As an end-user I dislike its UX and how it obfuscates the actual source in links I send and receive. Its man-in-the-middle approach is also highly undesirable. I've found one way to mostly work around it while still using Google as my default search engine and that is to use encrypted.google.com. Obviously this doesn't remove AMP from links sent to me but it's something. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes that loophole.
cdnsteve 9y ago
Since your site is actually going through Google's cache, they could add any additional tracking, etc they like, I'm sure they're already doing this. If you don't run Adsense or Google Analytics or anything else Google JS already on your site this gives them a new opportunity to further track users behaviour with a seemingly "friendly" mobile method. It's all about tracking users and selling more ads while keeping eyeballs on Google. You're giving up control of your own site and brand, at a great expense, for their benefit. No thanks.
- Jyaif 9y ago
  > I'm sure they're already doing this. Could you verify that? It should be a matter of popping open the Developer tools.
  - LunaSea 9y ago
    Well since the AMP cache is hosted exclusively by Google they already have the request logs to all those files. That contains your User-Agent header, your IP address, language and maybe cookies if they set those in the future.
bushin 9y ago
The only good thing that came out of AMP is that Apple finally fixing scrolling in overflows.
gnu8 9y ago
I don't even know what AMP is for, but I know if I click an AMP result on my phone, it won't load anything but a white screen. So one of my content blockers must be working...
spiderfarmer 9y ago
If everyone creates fast websites that don't suck, Google will consider AMP a success and kill the format.
- ENGNR 9y ago
  So why not just release AMP for use on domains as a reference implementation (with server side rendering for pre-cache), measure speed instead of implementation, and not use the google cache. They want the Google nav buttons on your site to keep the user inside their experience
RoryH 9y ago
This is the most Microsoft-esque thing Google has done IIRC!
aub3bhat 9y ago
Having suffered through unbelievably atrocious mobile news sites, I now refuse to open any news website that's NOT AMP. Those criticizing AMP have it wrong, Google could have very well just bypassed AMP for "instant publisher app" (something that if Apple did the same people (Gruber etc.) would wax poetic about how it was stroke of genius), instead you at least get to keep HTML/JS/CSS stack, without any "gatekeepers" like the Apple App Store. So yeah unless you are a mobile App developer, AMP is great for both developers and readers!
Chris2048 9y ago
AMP news articles lack comments. This is often were most of my interest lies. I want to see if anything in the article is called out in the comments.
- tytso 9y ago
  I actually think suppressing comments (sometimes called "the sewer of the internet") is a feature, not a bug. I block Facebook comments using a Chrome extension mainly because I don't want to send huge amounts of information to Facebook when browsing random web pages, but not having to see the comments is also a bonus.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Just calling them names doesn't change anything. You are assuming the article is more truthful than the average comment. FB posts are often not about anything, unlike news articles. FB and YT are entirely different.
    - tytso 9y ago
      The average article posted via a web page (or AMP) is definitely more well written, and generally more truthful, than the average Facebook comment. I would think this is pretty self-evidently obvious.
- niutech 9y ago
  It's up to publishers, but Disqus works fine in AMP pages: https://github.com/disqus/disqus-install-examples/tree/master/google-amp https://github.com/disqus/disqus-install-examples/tree/maste...
superasn 9y ago
I think every site should get an amp logo in Google search results and preference (same as an amp site) if the load time of the page is under 100ms. So now you have a choice, either DIY or use Google's tech to get it. This way will create dozens of tech companies competing with AMP focused on making the web faster - the end result that Google supposedly wants and everyone wins!
- akras14 9y ago
  Great idea
edent 9y ago
> Do you own a WordPress site? Turn AMP off or don’t enable it in the first place. A warning - I turned off the AMP plug in and it effectively removed my site from Google for a week or so. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp... The Google cache takes ages to clear away all the now-dead links and will serve 404s to your users. A nice incentive to stay trapped in their monoculture.
- niutech 9y ago
  You can redirect users to the full-blown pages, using e.g. mod_rewrite.
  - edent 9y ago
    If you'd like to set that up for me on a few thousand pages - that'd be swell :-)
- mthoms 9y ago
  I'm curious, besides the short term problem, how was your ranking affected overall?
  - edent 9y ago
    Hard to say. The 404s have dropped off, and I still appear in the results. But I'm not sure of any way to tell definitively.
landave 9y ago
I've read quite a lot about AMP, but I still don't really understand for what technical reason a new markup language (AMP HTML) and an additional javascript library is required to achieve the (claimed) effect. More specifically: Is there any evidence that AMP is able to provide a better result (at least in terms of performance) than just using a small subset of standard HTML, a little bit of CSS, getting rid of any javascript, and ensuring that the total page size is less than 100KB? If yes, I would be interested in the technical reasons.
- niutech 9y ago
  AMP JS library enables lazy loading of images/videos, so if you have a page with tens of them, you will notice the difference. > getting rid of any javascript Try to find a popular website without JS. Even HN uses it, so this is a moot point.
  - SXX 9y ago
    HN is fully functional without javascript.
  - acdha 9y ago
    > Try to find a popular website without JS. Even HN uses it, so this is a moot point. There's a big difference between not using JavaScript at all and doing it correctly with progressive enhancement. Any site which doesn't depend on a ton of JavaScript to render and uses lazy-loading where appropriate will see the same benefits and will be significantly more robust as well.
ENGNR 9y ago
AMP is coming for ecommerce next. Will there be checkout options other than Google? What's going to happen when voice interfaces take over. Amazon Echo already prioritises its own products. I've switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo and started moving non-tech people over (and they seem happy enough too). It's not in our interest to let the whole tech market consolidate into 5 walled gardens
- jshelly 9y ago
  I've just done the same myself. I am also having everyone I know use FF and DDG where possible.
athenot 9y ago
Maybe I don't understand AMP, but what value does it bring over having a very lean CSS and keep JS to the strict minimum? Last time I checked, a plain vanilla HTML page with a bit of embedded CSS (and perhaps a few async JS functions for stats) is lightning fast even on mobile.
- falcolas 9y ago
  None. The problem is that unless externally enforced (as AMP does), pages which keep lean CSS and JS are not the norm.
- adtac 9y ago
  That's the problem: no one is using plain vanilla HTML pages with lean JS/CSS anymore. Just go to any news website, disable your cache, disable any adblockers you might have and see the total data transferred or number of network requests. Example: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/26/middleeast/western-wall-israel-netanyahu/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/26/middleeast/western-wall-is... That link is in the frontpage of cnn.com right now. I disabled my cache, disabled uBlock and refreshed the page. 329 network requests and 3.9 megabytes of data transfer later, the page is still loading.
- acdha 9y ago
  The main value is to Google: it keeps people on google.com and using Google Ads. The only value to the user is that if you work somewhere dysfunctional you may be able to say “AMP doesn't allow that” and have it stick in a way that saying “This will bloat our page load times” will not.
- kuschku 9y ago
  (a) people stay longer on google.com (b) Google can track users better (c) Google gives AMP pages an advantage in the search, often even catapulting page 13 results to before the top #1 result – due to the AMP carousel.
falcolas 9y ago
I have enjoyed this AMP saga, and really look forward to the finale: how turning off AMP impacted SEO. Since the author has the "before" picture with AMP enabled, I'm really curious what the "after" will look like. EDIT: I'm curious about the downvotes - care to elaborate what you disagree with? The author indicated that SEO was a driving force for using AMP, so I think that being curious about the outcome would be acceptable...
vorpalhex 9y ago
"I would use a browser with javascript disabled". See, this is the point where AMP provides actual benefit. Many sites don't function at all without JS. AMP gives me a site that actually works without the extra crap.
- akras14 9y ago
  Valid point, but a surprising amount of sites do work. I.e Reddit, BBC, All Wordpress sites. The kind of content you would consume on a cheap phone and a slow connection. JS in my mind is for fancy apps like Google Maps (non amp) and serving ads.
apeace 9y ago
> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google. As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see their front page, I'll go to bbc.com. I think this article (and most AMP-bashing articles) are mostly fluff about how Google is "taking over" and "forcing" people down a certain path. When in reality everybody knows this is helping users. As I've said many times: propose a better solution for users to be able to load article content very quickly. The real, valid issues I'm seeing mentioned in this article are: * Links are to google.com, which really screws up sharing. * Apparently images and scrolling can be wonky, though I have never noticed this myself (and sounds like it could be easily solved[0] if it's true). So again, if you can solve this problem for users in a free, publisher-opt-in, global way without the links pointing to a third party, please share your solution. By the way, if you use CloudFlare, you can enable AMP without breaking normal links[1]. It is only the Google search engine that breaks links for AMP, not AMP itself. I do hope that Google adds an option in your account settings to opt-out of AMP results. That way the detractors can turn it off, and everyone else can be happy that pages load in < 1 second instead of 4-5 seconds. [0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
- Adverblessly 9y ago
  > I do hope that Google adds an option in your account settings to opt-out of AMP results. That way the detractors can turn it off, and everyone else can be happy that pages load in < 1 second instead of 4-5 seconds. This is not exactly what you want, but you can choose to open all search results (and by extension AMP results) in an external browser instead of the search app. For me, opening AMP links on FireFox redirects me to the non-AMP page, effectively eliminating AMP pages (technically they are still AMP results but in practice you get redirected to the non-AMP page). To do that, from https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7013866?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7013866?hl=en - Open the Google search app. Tap the hamburger menu. Tap Settings. Tap "Accounts & Privacy". Turn off "Open web pages in app".
nobleach 9y ago
Let me stress this major point. Google is NOT the web. They are but one major player. Yet when we speak of "SEO" we mean "pleasing Google". I find that reprehensible. Google is NOT fighting for a better web experience. They are trying desperately to achieve what Facebook has done... keeping users engaged. While I appreciate what Google has done to encourage web standards, they are totally screwing up with their attempt at recreating AOL. AMP is simply the latest example of keeping users on a Google site.
zeveb 9y ago
> Of course, the reason we have AMP is because Google wants users to see ads, something that is mostly missing with JavaScript disabled. Ding ding ding — this is IMHO the real reason for both AMP and the downvoting (and down-moderation) of anti-JavaScript comments on online forums (to include HN). It's all about money. Google aren't evil; neither are publishers, startups or venture capitalists. But it's hard to make money from a web in which end users are in control, and easy to make money if they are relatively powerless. Google, publishers, startups & venture capitalists alike all want to make money, and thus it's in their interest to encourage technical measures which decrease end-user power. It's also in their interest to discourage social discussions which support technical measures which increase end-user power. They don't consciously think in this terms, of course (in the words of Upton Sinclair, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it'), but that is why they act as they do. The thing is, every one of is an end-user at some point. Every Google employee, every CNN investor, every startup founder, every venture capitalist uses technology constantly. It's vitally important to the freedom of the web that we resist the temptation to require JavaScript, that we resist the lure of AMP, that we resist the siren song of further net centralisation. We have nothing to lose but our chains!
sturmen 9y ago
There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the user experience that people want but lights a fire under web developers to give them that experience without relying on Google's walled garden. How many stories of "Company X made a great product Y, but Company X is anti-consumer/evil/eats puppies, so the OSS made their own and it has grown into something great" have you heard? I think AMP is another one. The web has become bloated, where people use heavy JS frameworks like React to make their blog and then load 5MB of ad JS to load 10MB autoplaying videos. I dream of a day when static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll are the norm. Let's flex our muscles and make that happen and show the world that AMP is good but openness is better.
- technofiend 9y ago
  You're right but man you get a lot of that browsing with noscript. Reddit is loads faster with noscript blocking all the cruft they wrap around that site and that's not even one of the clickbaity sites.
  - chefandy 9y ago
    That's true but it's a band-aid fix. We need to figure out how people can browse the web efficiently while ensuring websites are financially feasible, and everybody simply blocking javascript is not a financially feasible solution. I'd be more than happy to pay cash for a lot of stuff rather than have to deal with tracking/obnoxious ads, but I think the web would be a much worse place if all non-advertisement content was behind paywalls. I have no idea what a sustainable solution would look like. Something similar to the Brave browser that was actually agreed upon by site owners and users alike, where site owners would turn off all of the BS for people that paid cash? Of course, that doesn't touch the problem of people using crazy over-the-top, poorly optimized front-end stacks for things that could easily be accomplished with a regular web server and a smattering of Ajax.
c8g 9y ago
please change your hn discussion link >https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alexkras.com%2Fi-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site%2F&t=I%20decided%20to%20disable%20AMP%20on%20my%20site https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....
- akras14 9y ago
  It's auto generated, clicking submit will redirect to the right discussion
  - c8g 9y ago
    I thought it was a typo but it seems all your post contains link like this :)
callumlocke 9y ago
AMP is bad for publishers, but even worse for publishers who don't get on board. It's similar to Yelp's strategy: create a new problem for businesses, then sell them a (partial) solution to it.
obilgic 9y ago
AMP is the perfect way to punish big publishers for their slow websites. Google can't punish them by simply lowering their rankings, people want to see those big publishers.
davotoula 9y ago
I find it frustrating bookmarking and/or sharing the AMP url with others. Ideally it would save / share the original URL, not the AMP url.
valladanger 9y ago
I agree with most of the article, but I think that my browsing experience with news (and similar) websites has been improved overall by AMP in a way that I almost regret visiting websites that offer no support for it. On the other hand, I also think that publishers need more control over their content and how they serve it to their users. Having said that, if AMP were to be integrated with GCP it could improve the service for everyone involved, not only publishers and consumers (yes, even for Google itself); for example, a publisher could have an AMP Cloud Storage bucket configured under the domain of the publisher in order to use the its identity and not google's one. On the consumer's end it could be as simple as a switch to turn off amp results for a single session or for every single one. At the end of the day, lets not forget that it is a fairly new approach to improve the web experience (and not a bad one at all) and there are options and many paths that AMP could follow in order to become a better experience for everyone.
notadoc 9y ago
From a user perspective, the speed of AMP is nice but I absolutely hate not being able to see the original URL of a site. I want to see the original URL, certainly not a CDN mirror URL that could obfuscate or muddy the source.
zeep 9y ago
People should also stop making Android apps whenever a website is perfectly suited, but of course that won't happen. A webview is a bit like AMP but it is still better then a true native Android app (when it is easily avoidable).
haterswillhate 9y ago
Do anybody agree with me, that amp is just an another tightly controlled sandbox where you can't really do anything as a developer? Blaah, almost same as developing iOS applications these days.
aeromusek 9y ago
> I am really surprised that big publishers are not bothered by this fact as much as I am. I suspect they are just as bothered, but don't really have a choice about this either. Placement on the search results page is so valuable that Google holds a really big stick when introducing new 'standards' like this. Just look how little of a typical mobile SERP is real 'organic' content now: http://imgur.com/UhNZvL2 http://imgur.com/UhNZvL2
- kuschku 9y ago
  I did the same: Content that is NOT organic search results is marked on the right side in Google’s colors: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/serp_annotated_web.png https://s3.kuschku.de/public/serp_annotated_web.png Notice how 2/3rds of the page is taken by the app’s own UX, and of the shown results, another 40% is taken by embedded content. The page shows only 9 search results, and zero above the fold.
amatecha 9y ago
I was about to post that AMP breaks scrolling on my iPhone (thus rendering all AMP-intercepted websites unusable), but it looks like they finally realized it and stopped showing AMP results to my version of iOS. :thumbsup:
balls187 9y ago
On one hand google's AMP is ruining the open web. On the other hand, mobile pages suck. Too many ads, annoying popups and interstitials, and tracking scripts.
- akras14 9y ago
  Between the rock and a hard place
Radio_Killer 9y ago
AMP also sucks for accessibility. Try this on Android's Chrome: * Do a Google query containing an AMP result * Zoom in the Google search (since it's not very accessible either) * Open an AMP page Result: You can't zoom out anymore and left-to-right scrolling is unavailable in this state. So you have to go back, zoom out and click the link again. After which you can sometimes zoom back in again. This makes browsing a real hassle. I know Google doesn't care that much about accessibility, but boy this drives me crazy almost every day of the week.
- tdeck 9y ago
  I have trouble reading small text and images, and I've experienced this as well. It's particularly bad when an article has an infographic that's clearly designed to be viewed on a desktop. Completely disregarding my "force enable zoom" browser setting, AMP won't let me make those images any bigger than the width of my phone. I always have to switch to the actual site, wasting my time loading two pages.

665 points by akras14 9y ago

romanovcode 9y ago

The fact that website content is stored on Google servers and being served from Google is just disgusting.

sofaofthedamned 9y ago
Not all of it is. Most i've seen recently have a /amp/ subdir on the correct domain, not Google.
- OJFord 9y ago
  That's just the publisher putting AMP versions on a different URL, Google's still going to cache it and serve it from its own.
parenthephobia 9y ago
Is hosting your site on Google Cloud Platform equally disgusting?
- kennydude 9y ago
  AMP forces it, GCP is a choice
  - parenthephobia 9y ago
    AMP is a choice. Otherwise, this article wouldn't have been written!
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Yes, it is technically a choice. But since Google abuses their search monopoly to coerce people to start using AMP it is not a free choice any more. There is a price to pay for not using AMP and that price has nothing to do with your users.
    - mthoms 9y ago
      As a user, can you please show me how I can opt out of AMP?
briandear 9y ago
So don’t search with Google and it won’t affect you.
ehsankia 9y ago
Giving you free hosting all across the world, much closer to your users, is disgusting? Unless you're hosting a webserver on your computer, your server is most likely being hosted in the cloud somewhere (aka some random computer somewhere in the world). How is it being on a Google server, instead of company X's server, suddenly disgusting?
- int_19h 9y ago
  Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.
  - Gigablah 9y ago
    So how about other CDNs like Cloudflare?
    - LunaSea 9y ago
      Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.
      - ehsankia 9y ago
        You do have the choice... The only part that forces you to use Google's cache is to get on their search carousel, but other than that, you can still use AMP and not their cache.
        callumlocke 9y ago
        If your competitors are doing it, and you want to survive, you don't have a choice.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    By that logic, does AWS have huge amount of power? Why does it matter what server the content is hosted on? Aren't almost all websites hosted on a remote server? The only difference is Google gets to choose what shows up on their search, and they always had that control anyway.

xbmcuser 9y ago

Amp was the reply to Facebook articles the problem was because Facebook pages loaded faster more people were posting and sharing Facebook pages which is worse than Google Amp.

vog 9y ago
This is an interesting thought. Do you have any sources to back this up?
bartl 9y ago
I think people share Facebook pages because they found the content on Facebook. Speed has nothing to do with it.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Back when FB release FB Instant, it increased my engagement with shared links significantly. Usually, on a phone browser, the thought of clicking on a link which would navigate away from the app and load a heavy full-fledged website would make me not want to click on shared links at all. But with the lightning symbol next to Instant-supported links? Click right away. In the worst case, if the content is bad, you will back where you were in a second.

boramalper 9y ago

The author has some very valid points against AMP from a technical standpoint, but for me there is a single reason that is sufficient: the Web is, and should stay, free and open. Indeed, I'm having really hard time trying to understand how people can be fine with AMP while fighting for the net neutrality and so on.

chris__butters 9y ago
Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its private and only fb knows it.
  - boramalper 9y ago
    I am not saying exactly that Google is evil, and maybe they don't even have bad intentions (heck, we are talking about a corporate identity here, how far can we apply morals?). But, what I am thinking is that AMP and its rivals (such as Instant Articles) hurt the free & open Web. For instance, Google Search is invaluable, but as a side effect, a website that doesn't end up on the first page of a Google Search result for instance, is nearly non-existent. Also, the notion of hyperlinks are crucial to the Web and these projects break it. Hyperlinks originate from an article from 1945, "As We May Think"[1], and the term itself is coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 for Project Xanadu. That's how you create a web that is now called the Web. That's also what Google's PageRank algorithm depends on, at least at the beginning. Now, letting Google host your content, under a link such as `https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html` https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html`, you are breaking hyperlinks: it is no more linking different websites together. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

gizmo 9y ago

AMP is bad and should be resisted. It is an attack on the distributed nature of the web. The web is slow because every page of text comes with megabytes of javascript cruft to spy on users and serve ads. The solution is to make web pages that don't suck. AMP puts even more power in the hands of Google. Just say no.

mehmetkose 9y ago

Google like big pacman, and eating the web

k__ 9y ago

AMP somehow doesn't work right on my smartphone. When I go to news.google.com an click of any of the AMP links on the front page, I always get thrown back to news.google.com when I scroll on the AMP page.

dv35z 9y ago
And frustratingly, you can't background-open AMP links from Google News. Instead, AMP articles open wuth their own (annoying) navigation, where swiping goes a completely different article.

runn1ng 9y ago

Funny thing is - I, as a reader, love AMP sites. If a website offers AMP, I will prefer it from normal thing. It has less ads, less bloat, better signal/noise ratio, and the AMP websites look pleasant to eye. So I prefer them even on desktop, ironically. I still have the issues with Google's AMP caching. But AMP itself is great.

romanovcode 9y ago
You can use Firefox and have 0 ads with uBlock Origin.
- runn1ng 9y ago
  AMP sites still look better. I am using this simple extension that shows me when a website has AMP version and I switch to it (not sure if there is an extension that does this automatically). Doesn't work 100% though https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amplifier-ampcanonical-sw/ennckgigejppolagdoadgaaodkhopjnb/related?hl=cs https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amplifier-ampcanon... edit: oh, this one seems to do it automatically. Nice https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F-desktop-amp/igokgmnkplcfgnegidccbgmlnecaffhh/related https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F...
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    The problem that the tech to make any page look like an amp page existed long before amp. But Google, rather than heavily penalising heavy websites decided to push AMP. They could have just pushed for normal HTML but no, now everybody has to write two versions of the pages. (Granted, à cms can handle generating AMP alongside RSS and so on)
    - runn1ng 9y ago
      Yeah, everyone can do non-bloated websites that load fast and look good, but nobody does. Market doesn't value those? I don't know. AMP is a good idea, unfortunately it needs strong actors like Google or Twitter to push it.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. Safari actually has an inconsistent scrolling speed compared to the rest of the OS. iOS 11 makes all Safari pages scroll at the same speed as AMP sites (-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch) Also important distinction for people to remember - AMP is two products: - CDN with preloading pages in Google Search results - Framework/guidelines for building performant results The 'morals' and impacts to the 'free and open web' of these two are completely different.

cdubzzz 9y ago
Re: two products, I realized this but never really thought about it. Can one self-host an AMP (framework) implementation? Does Google still promote such content, even if it isn't part of their CDN?
- kennydude 9y ago
  It could be re-implemented, it's just "web components" last I looked
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Sure. It's just a stricter subset of HTML and a JS library for custom components. Self host it. No, Google won't give you the special AMP-bolt - nor should they because they can't provide the instant load as they can for other AMP sites that they self-host on their CDN.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    That's where I have trouble accepting AMP. I love the concept and Google's support would be huge, but Google doesn't seem to be truly promoting making the mobile web better with AMP. They are promoting making the mobile web better with their CDN (i.e. by centralizing/controlling the content).
- dangoldin 9y ago
  I actually converted my blog (http://dangoldin.com/ http://dangoldin.com/) a while back to be entirely in AMP. In this way I'm using the framework without caring about the CDN element. After reading this I may just bite the bullet and remove AMP and just cut out a bunch of crap to get it optimized for lower bandwidth devices.

pavement 9y ago

AMP has all the charisma of Silverlight. When I see it, I am impelled away from it, and toward anything closer to normal, no matter how ugly or slow.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

torrent-of-ions 9y ago

In the 90s web pages loaded instantly. Now we have faster computers and faster networks, but apparently we need something like AMP to make the web fast. We have regressed.

Klathmon 9y ago
Those are some extremely rose colored glasses you are wearing if you think web pages loaded instantly in the 90's I remember using the web on a 56k modem (which was pretty damn fast!) and waiting 30+ seconds for pages to fully load.
- tdy721 9y ago
  The text was still fast. And I NEVER saw had the text disappear for a second while the page updated the font... The text was still fast, and the developers assumed you had a crappy modem in at least 80% of cases. The web is getting slower.
- torrent-of-ions 9y ago
  Of course 56k was slow. It's 56k. But if you ever used a faster line in the 90s it was virtually instant. Everyone has those faster lines now, but it's never instant.
klibertp 9y ago
We've lived through different 90s then. Most of my early porn was loading for ages, first appearing partially, then slowly loading the rest, to finally display a 600x400 (full screen!) image. Well, I was rather young then, so one image was often enough, and the waiting time made it all the more... satisfying, but it sure as hell wasn't "loaded instantly" :)
- torrent-of-ions 9y ago
  I'm not talking about downloading images. I'm talking about web pages that contain information. Reading news, recipes etc.

TekMol 9y ago

To me, AMP is the same wallet garden that Facebook is. Google and Facebook both say: "Give us your content. But without the crap. Just the content. Since we don't allow crap, users prefer the experience over here. So your content will have more readers then on your own domain.". And for some reason publishers are crazy enough to do that. Instead of removing the crap on their own domains in the first place.

Chris2048 9y ago
you are forced to login to FB, is the same true with AMP?
- TekMol 9y ago
  Whatever Google wants you to do to access the content. Once it is on their domain, they have full control over it.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    so, do you need to log on to access AMPs content?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Not yet.
      - type0 9y ago
        What a relief.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    It's not on their domain though. Or at least, it's not _only_ on their domain. Google is just caching content served from the publisher's domain; you can access that content just fine without going through Google.

kennydude 9y ago

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Thought it felt wrong. Makes me want to use Google less and less

notfitforwrk 9y ago

Don't be evil. Just a little is fine. No one will notice. Go on then!

RKearney 9y ago

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Oddly enough Apple is changing the scrolling behavior in Safari for iOS 11 to scroll how the amp pages do. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-coming-to-mobile-safari/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-comin...

javindo 9y ago

I have a visual impairment and one of the things I love about Chrome on Android is the ability to override sites blocking pinch to zoom (i.e. "force enable pinch to zoom"). AMP, also made by Google, seems to somehow get around this browser setting, making AMP sites unreadable and therefore completely useless to me. Why does Google have these obvious discrepancies between their own products?

ClassyJacket 9y ago
Google's approach to design has always seemed to be to wall off a bunch of teams in separate soundproof rooms with no communication with each other, meetings, or contact with the outside world. Also they're only allowed to use iPhones. This is the only way I can imagine we ended up with 437 different messaging apps and counting, and the problem you described.
- fgandiya 9y ago
  > Also they're only allowed to use iPhones Why is that? Seems a bit ironic...
  - marcuslager 9y ago
    Hey fella. U alright? You seeem a bit sarcastic.
Bartweiss 9y ago
AMP with Chrome on Android also breaks the back button on many (all) sites? If you pass through several links within a site, then hit back, Google will forget all that and dump you back to search results. Disable AMP and the problem goes away.

jacquesm 9y ago

Why would anybody enable it to begin with? There is absolutely no reason for sites such as the one linked here to have AMP enabled. It's a pox on the web and Google has enough power as it is. The sooner AMP dies the better. If you want your site to load faster get rid of the cruft.

jononor 9y ago
Because Google promises you higher ranking in search results...
- tdy721 9y ago
  However, this is still true if you get rid of the cruft
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Not strictly - apparently the top carousel of results actually mandate AMP.
joeblau 9y ago
I enabled it on https://www.gitignore.io https://www.gitignore.io a few months ago because it suggested that it would improve my mobile users experience. After posts like these, I think it's time to take it back down.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Only an anecdote, but AMP trashes my mobile experience. Using Chrome on Android (so it ought to be good...) it rewrites back-button functionality, so that even after I've changed through 5 different pages, a single 'back' press takes me all the way off the site to Google search results. It also eats a bunch of screen real estate with the AMP bar for longer than the normal address bar.

omnifischer 9y ago

@alexkras Sorry this comes from me in Nigeria using a second-hand MotoG (1.Gen). May be your website is not loading 23 trackers + unnecessary js. But many websites, load such crap. Please especially in third-world, we have so poor phones. Only google-CDN avoids all these. (yes, google does track me but we do not all have unlimited bandwidth).

niutech 9y ago
Hey, would you like to try the brand new AMP Browser? It should help when the Internet connection on your PC is poor: http://ampbrowser.com http://ampbrowser.com
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > try the brand new AMP Browser? I'm only seeing a Windows build on the website. Doesn't help OP much when they have a phone: "Please especially in third-world, we have so poor phones." I don't know if you've been to Africa, but PCs are not common there unless you're working in a company. Depending on where you are, a small portion of the population has personal laptops. Otherwise feature phones or smartphones are the best people have. So linking to a Windows-only application for someone who lives in a developing country and only lists a cellphone may not be very applicable to them.
jbreckmckye 9y ago
Low-power phones in developing nations were exactly the platform we targeted when implementing _The Guardian_, and I would advise every seriously global publisher to do the same.
- omnifischer 9y ago
  even amp.guardian page has 33 requests (677kB) whereas cdn.ampproject.org has 4 requests (124kB). Try this: https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-means-brexit-review-political-farce-terrifying-implications https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.thegu... or https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-means-brexit-review-political-farce-terrifying-implications https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/22/brexit-... Are you from Guardian?

ilmiont 9y ago

Good! I stand firmly against AMP and the centralisation of the web, it's a predatory move to increase Google's prevalence online, and one I will not be supporting with any of my upcoming projects.

mondoshawan 9y ago
You remember Akamai, right? AMP is just another CDN. Back in the 90s, when Akamai was fighting to establish themselves, you'd see tons of fetches from hosts like a123.d.akamai.com on big name properties like CNN. Nowadays it's pretty much hidden, and pervasive. Google is attempting to entrench a reverse proxy cache the same way Akamai has for years. AMP is nothing new. The only difference here is that they make it obvious you're using a CDN, whereas Akamai is almost completely transparent and runs close to 80-90% of the traffic of the "open" web -- you just don't know about it.
- mkj 9y ago
  No, akamai didn't change page layout/content.
  - brians 9y ago
    https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/front-end-optimization-feo.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/front-end-optimizatio... Opt-in by the publisher, of course.
- LunaSea 9y ago
  Yeah but Akamai is optional. Google's CDN / cache in AMP isn't. Big difference.
  - Gigablah 9y ago
    How is Akamai optional for a user? If you're saying that it's optional for publishers, then your argument doesn't make sense since AMP is optional for publishers as well (I mean, the author disabled it and all).

dayjah 9y ago

There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G speeds while roaming somehow, which is resulting in me seeing a lot of butchered pages. As the author mentions: > AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I’ve seen it fail fairly regularly, leaving the article with an empty white square instead of the image. Text content is very fast, but images either don't load or partially load making the reading experience pretty poor.

jsnell 9y ago
You're saying that AMP doesn't help with slow connections, based on AMP not loading all resources on 2G. But you're missing the data point for non-AMP pages on 2G. Are you sure it's not even worse? It's hard to believe how bloated many modern websites are, before trying to load them over 2G. We're talking megabytes of data and tens of connections to display what should be a 20kB of text.
- corobo 9y ago
  If a regular page doesn't load on a 2G connection and an AMP page doesn't load on a 2G connection.. what's the point of AMP?
- acdha 9y ago
  AMP puts 100KB of JavaScript in the initial render path, and a bunch of CSS. That doesn't mean that other sites cannot be worse but it means that there's no way to make an AMP page which doesn't require transferring at least that much data. I notice this fairly regularly in marginal network coverage (subway tunnels/platforms) where AMP pages load no faster than any well-optimized site unless the stars are aligned and you actually get a cache hit.
  - niutech 9y ago
    Keep in mind that this AMP JS library is being loaded from the CDN only once for all AMP pages, then cached in the browser.

pokermike 9y ago

The author is dead-on. I wish more publishers would resist and stop supporting AMP. As an end-user I dislike its UX and how it obfuscates the actual source in links I send and receive. Its man-in-the-middle approach is also highly undesirable. I've found one way to mostly work around it while still using Google as my default search engine and that is to use encrypted.google.com. Obviously this doesn't remove AMP from links sent to me but it's something. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes that loophole.

cdnsteve 9y ago

Since your site is actually going through Google's cache, they could add any additional tracking, etc they like, I'm sure they're already doing this. If you don't run Adsense or Google Analytics or anything else Google JS already on your site this gives them a new opportunity to further track users behaviour with a seemingly "friendly" mobile method. It's all about tracking users and selling more ads while keeping eyeballs on Google. You're giving up control of your own site and brand, at a great expense, for their benefit. No thanks.

Jyaif 9y ago
> I'm sure they're already doing this. Could you verify that? It should be a matter of popping open the Developer tools.
- LunaSea 9y ago
  Well since the AMP cache is hosted exclusively by Google they already have the request logs to all those files. That contains your User-Agent header, your IP address, language and maybe cookies if they set those in the future.

bushin 9y ago

The only good thing that came out of AMP is that Apple finally fixing scrolling in overflows.

gnu8 9y ago

I don't even know what AMP is for, but I know if I click an AMP result on my phone, it won't load anything but a white screen. So one of my content blockers must be working...

spiderfarmer 9y ago

If everyone creates fast websites that don't suck, Google will consider AMP a success and kill the format.

ENGNR 9y ago
So why not just release AMP for use on domains as a reference implementation (with server side rendering for pre-cache), measure speed instead of implementation, and not use the google cache. They want the Google nav buttons on your site to keep the user inside their experience

RoryH 9y ago

This is the most Microsoft-esque thing Google has done IIRC!

aub3bhat 9y ago

Having suffered through unbelievably atrocious mobile news sites, I now refuse to open any news website that's NOT AMP. Those criticizing AMP have it wrong, Google could have very well just bypassed AMP for "instant publisher app" (something that if Apple did the same people (Gruber etc.) would wax poetic about how it was stroke of genius), instead you at least get to keep HTML/JS/CSS stack, without any "gatekeepers" like the Apple App Store. So yeah unless you are a mobile App developer, AMP is great for both developers and readers!

Chris2048 9y ago

AMP news articles lack comments. This is often were most of my interest lies. I want to see if anything in the article is called out in the comments.

tytso 9y ago
I actually think suppressing comments (sometimes called "the sewer of the internet") is a feature, not a bug. I block Facebook comments using a Chrome extension mainly because I don't want to send huge amounts of information to Facebook when browsing random web pages, but not having to see the comments is also a bonus.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Just calling them names doesn't change anything. You are assuming the article is more truthful than the average comment. FB posts are often not about anything, unlike news articles. FB and YT are entirely different.
  - tytso 9y ago
    The average article posted via a web page (or AMP) is definitely more well written, and generally more truthful, than the average Facebook comment. I would think this is pretty self-evidently obvious.
niutech 9y ago
It's up to publishers, but Disqus works fine in AMP pages: https://github.com/disqus/disqus-install-examples/tree/master/google-amp https://github.com/disqus/disqus-install-examples/tree/maste...

superasn 9y ago

I think every site should get an amp logo in Google search results and preference (same as an amp site) if the load time of the page is under 100ms. So now you have a choice, either DIY or use Google's tech to get it. This way will create dozens of tech companies competing with AMP focused on making the web faster - the end result that Google supposedly wants and everyone wins!

akras14 9y ago
Great idea

edent 9y ago

> Do you own a WordPress site? Turn AMP off or don’t enable it in the first place. A warning - I turned off the AMP plug in and it effectively removed my site from Google for a week or so. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp... The Google cache takes ages to clear away all the now-dead links and will serve 404s to your users. A nice incentive to stay trapped in their monoculture.

niutech 9y ago
You can redirect users to the full-blown pages, using e.g. mod_rewrite.
- edent 9y ago
  If you'd like to set that up for me on a few thousand pages - that'd be swell :-)
mthoms 9y ago
I'm curious, besides the short term problem, how was your ranking affected overall?
- edent 9y ago
  Hard to say. The 404s have dropped off, and I still appear in the results. But I'm not sure of any way to tell definitively.

landave 9y ago

I've read quite a lot about AMP, but I still don't really understand for what technical reason a new markup language (AMP HTML) and an additional javascript library is required to achieve the (claimed) effect. More specifically: Is there any evidence that AMP is able to provide a better result (at least in terms of performance) than just using a small subset of standard HTML, a little bit of CSS, getting rid of any javascript, and ensuring that the total page size is less than 100KB? If yes, I would be interested in the technical reasons.

niutech 9y ago
AMP JS library enables lazy loading of images/videos, so if you have a page with tens of them, you will notice the difference. > getting rid of any javascript Try to find a popular website without JS. Even HN uses it, so this is a moot point.
- SXX 9y ago
  HN is fully functional without javascript.
- acdha 9y ago
  > Try to find a popular website without JS. Even HN uses it, so this is a moot point. There's a big difference between not using JavaScript at all and doing it correctly with progressive enhancement. Any site which doesn't depend on a ton of JavaScript to render and uses lazy-loading where appropriate will see the same benefits and will be significantly more robust as well.

ENGNR 9y ago

AMP is coming for ecommerce next. Will there be checkout options other than Google? What's going to happen when voice interfaces take over. Amazon Echo already prioritises its own products. I've switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo and started moving non-tech people over (and they seem happy enough too). It's not in our interest to let the whole tech market consolidate into 5 walled gardens

jshelly 9y ago
I've just done the same myself. I am also having everyone I know use FF and DDG where possible.

athenot 9y ago

Maybe I don't understand AMP, but what value does it bring over having a very lean CSS and keep JS to the strict minimum? Last time I checked, a plain vanilla HTML page with a bit of embedded CSS (and perhaps a few async JS functions for stats) is lightning fast even on mobile.

falcolas 9y ago
None. The problem is that unless externally enforced (as AMP does), pages which keep lean CSS and JS are not the norm.
adtac 9y ago
That's the problem: no one is using plain vanilla HTML pages with lean JS/CSS anymore. Just go to any news website, disable your cache, disable any adblockers you might have and see the total data transferred or number of network requests. Example: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/26/middleeast/western-wall-israel-netanyahu/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/26/middleeast/western-wall-is... That link is in the frontpage of cnn.com right now. I disabled my cache, disabled uBlock and refreshed the page. 329 network requests and 3.9 megabytes of data transfer later, the page is still loading.
acdha 9y ago
The main value is to Google: it keeps people on google.com and using Google Ads. The only value to the user is that if you work somewhere dysfunctional you may be able to say “AMP doesn't allow that” and have it stick in a way that saying “This will bloat our page load times” will not.
kuschku 9y ago
(a) people stay longer on google.com (b) Google can track users better (c) Google gives AMP pages an advantage in the search, often even catapulting page 13 results to before the top #1 result – due to the AMP carousel.

falcolas 9y ago

I have enjoyed this AMP saga, and really look forward to the finale: how turning off AMP impacted SEO. Since the author has the "before" picture with AMP enabled, I'm really curious what the "after" will look like. EDIT: I'm curious about the downvotes - care to elaborate what you disagree with? The author indicated that SEO was a driving force for using AMP, so I think that being curious about the outcome would be acceptable...

vorpalhex 9y ago

"I would use a browser with javascript disabled". See, this is the point where AMP provides actual benefit. Many sites don't function at all without JS. AMP gives me a site that actually works without the extra crap.

akras14 9y ago
Valid point, but a surprising amount of sites do work. I.e Reddit, BBC, All Wordpress sites. The kind of content you would consume on a cheap phone and a slow connection. JS in my mind is for fancy apps like Google Maps (non amp) and serving ads.

apeace 9y ago

> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google. As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see their front page, I'll go to bbc.com. I think this article (and most AMP-bashing articles) are mostly fluff about how Google is "taking over" and "forcing" people down a certain path. When in reality everybody knows this is helping users. As I've said many times: propose a better solution for users to be able to load article content very quickly. The real, valid issues I'm seeing mentioned in this article are: * Links are to google.com, which really screws up sharing. * Apparently images and scrolling can be wonky, though I have never noticed this myself (and sounds like it could be easily solved[0] if it's true). So again, if you can solve this problem for users in a free, publisher-opt-in, global way without the links pointing to a third party, please share your solution. By the way, if you use CloudFlare, you can enable AMP without breaking normal links[1]. It is only the Google search engine that breaks links for AMP, not AMP itself. I do hope that Google adds an option in your account settings to opt-out of AMP results. That way the detractors can turn it off, and everyone else can be happy that pages load in < 1 second instead of 4-5 seconds. [0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/

Adverblessly 9y ago
> I do hope that Google adds an option in your account settings to opt-out of AMP results. That way the detractors can turn it off, and everyone else can be happy that pages load in < 1 second instead of 4-5 seconds. This is not exactly what you want, but you can choose to open all search results (and by extension AMP results) in an external browser instead of the search app. For me, opening AMP links on FireFox redirects me to the non-AMP page, effectively eliminating AMP pages (technically they are still AMP results but in practice you get redirected to the non-AMP page). To do that, from https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7013866?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7013866?hl=en - Open the Google search app. Tap the hamburger menu. Tap Settings. Tap "Accounts & Privacy". Turn off "Open web pages in app".

nobleach 9y ago

Let me stress this major point. Google is NOT the web. They are but one major player. Yet when we speak of "SEO" we mean "pleasing Google". I find that reprehensible. Google is NOT fighting for a better web experience. They are trying desperately to achieve what Facebook has done... keeping users engaged. While I appreciate what Google has done to encourage web standards, they are totally screwing up with their attempt at recreating AOL. AMP is simply the latest example of keeping users on a Google site.

zeveb 9y ago

> Of course, the reason we have AMP is because Google wants users to see ads, something that is mostly missing with JavaScript disabled. Ding ding ding — this is IMHO the real reason for both AMP and the downvoting (and down-moderation) of anti-JavaScript comments on online forums (to include HN). It's all about money. Google aren't evil; neither are publishers, startups or venture capitalists. But it's hard to make money from a web in which end users are in control, and easy to make money if they are relatively powerless. Google, publishers, startups & venture capitalists alike all want to make money, and thus it's in their interest to encourage technical measures which decrease end-user power. It's also in their interest to discourage social discussions which support technical measures which increase end-user power. They don't consciously think in this terms, of course (in the words of Upton Sinclair, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it'), but that is why they act as they do. The thing is, every one of is an end-user at some point. Every Google employee, every CNN investor, every startup founder, every venture capitalist uses technology constantly. It's vitally important to the freedom of the web that we resist the temptation to require JavaScript, that we resist the lure of AMP, that we resist the siren song of further net centralisation. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

sturmen 9y ago

There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the user experience that people want but lights a fire under web developers to give them that experience without relying on Google's walled garden. How many stories of "Company X made a great product Y, but Company X is anti-consumer/evil/eats puppies, so the OSS made their own and it has grown into something great" have you heard? I think AMP is another one. The web has become bloated, where people use heavy JS frameworks like React to make their blog and then load 5MB of ad JS to load 10MB autoplaying videos. I dream of a day when static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll are the norm. Let's flex our muscles and make that happen and show the world that AMP is good but openness is better.

technofiend 9y ago
You're right but man you get a lot of that browsing with noscript. Reddit is loads faster with noscript blocking all the cruft they wrap around that site and that's not even one of the clickbaity sites.
- chefandy 9y ago
  That's true but it's a band-aid fix. We need to figure out how people can browse the web efficiently while ensuring websites are financially feasible, and everybody simply blocking javascript is not a financially feasible solution. I'd be more than happy to pay cash for a lot of stuff rather than have to deal with tracking/obnoxious ads, but I think the web would be a much worse place if all non-advertisement content was behind paywalls. I have no idea what a sustainable solution would look like. Something similar to the Brave browser that was actually agreed upon by site owners and users alike, where site owners would turn off all of the BS for people that paid cash? Of course, that doesn't touch the problem of people using crazy over-the-top, poorly optimized front-end stacks for things that could easily be accomplished with a regular web server and a smattering of Ajax.

c8g 9y ago

please change your hn discussion link >https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alexkras.com%2Fi-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site%2F&t=I%20decided%20to%20disable%20AMP%20on%20my%20site https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....

akras14 9y ago
It's auto generated, clicking submit will redirect to the right discussion
- c8g 9y ago
  I thought it was a typo but it seems all your post contains link like this :)

callumlocke 9y ago

AMP is bad for publishers, but even worse for publishers who don't get on board. It's similar to Yelp's strategy: create a new problem for businesses, then sell them a (partial) solution to it.

obilgic 9y ago

AMP is the perfect way to punish big publishers for their slow websites. Google can't punish them by simply lowering their rankings, people want to see those big publishers.

davotoula 9y ago

I find it frustrating bookmarking and/or sharing the AMP url with others. Ideally it would save / share the original URL, not the AMP url.

valladanger 9y ago

I agree with most of the article, but I think that my browsing experience with news (and similar) websites has been improved overall by AMP in a way that I almost regret visiting websites that offer no support for it. On the other hand, I also think that publishers need more control over their content and how they serve it to their users. Having said that, if AMP were to be integrated with GCP it could improve the service for everyone involved, not only publishers and consumers (yes, even for Google itself); for example, a publisher could have an AMP Cloud Storage bucket configured under the domain of the publisher in order to use the its identity and not google's one. On the consumer's end it could be as simple as a switch to turn off amp results for a single session or for every single one. At the end of the day, lets not forget that it is a fairly new approach to improve the web experience (and not a bad one at all) and there are options and many paths that AMP could follow in order to become a better experience for everyone.

notadoc 9y ago

From a user perspective, the speed of AMP is nice but I absolutely hate not being able to see the original URL of a site. I want to see the original URL, certainly not a CDN mirror URL that could obfuscate or muddy the source.

zeep 9y ago

People should also stop making Android apps whenever a website is perfectly suited, but of course that won't happen. A webview is a bit like AMP but it is still better then a true native Android app (when it is easily avoidable).

haterswillhate 9y ago

Do anybody agree with me, that amp is just an another tightly controlled sandbox where you can't really do anything as a developer? Blaah, almost same as developing iOS applications these days.

aeromusek 9y ago

> I am really surprised that big publishers are not bothered by this fact as much as I am. I suspect they are just as bothered, but don't really have a choice about this either. Placement on the search results page is so valuable that Google holds a really big stick when introducing new 'standards' like this. Just look how little of a typical mobile SERP is real 'organic' content now: http://imgur.com/UhNZvL2 http://imgur.com/UhNZvL2

kuschku 9y ago
I did the same: Content that is NOT organic search results is marked on the right side in Google’s colors: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/serp_annotated_web.png https://s3.kuschku.de/public/serp_annotated_web.png Notice how 2/3rds of the page is taken by the app’s own UX, and of the shown results, another 40% is taken by embedded content. The page shows only 9 search results, and zero above the fold.

amatecha 9y ago

I was about to post that AMP breaks scrolling on my iPhone (thus rendering all AMP-intercepted websites unusable), but it looks like they finally realized it and stopped showing AMP results to my version of iOS. :thumbsup:

balls187 9y ago

On one hand google's AMP is ruining the open web. On the other hand, mobile pages suck. Too many ads, annoying popups and interstitials, and tracking scripts.

akras14 9y ago
Between the rock and a hard place

Radio_Killer 9y ago

AMP also sucks for accessibility. Try this on Android's Chrome: * Do a Google query containing an AMP result * Zoom in the Google search (since it's not very accessible either) * Open an AMP page Result: You can't zoom out anymore and left-to-right scrolling is unavailable in this state. So you have to go back, zoom out and click the link again. After which you can sometimes zoom back in again. This makes browsing a real hassle. I know Google doesn't care that much about accessibility, but boy this drives me crazy almost every day of the week.

tdeck 9y ago
I have trouble reading small text and images, and I've experienced this as well. It's particularly bad when an article has an infographic that's clearly designed to be viewed on a desktop. Completely disregarding my "force enable zoom" browser setting, AMP won't let me make those images any bigger than the width of my phone. I always have to switch to the actual site, wasting my time loading two pages.