8 ms·

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

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.
  - mnm1 9y ago
    "We need to figure out how people can browse the web efficiently while ensuring websites are financially feasible" I'm trying to figure out how to make JS blocking available to normal end users. Why should users have to put up with the current shitty situation when a simple, technical solution is available that doesn't involve Google or anyone else whose intentions are not aligned with users' intentions? The main challenge is fixing the UI so that it can be used by the least computer literate users.
    - nailer 9y ago
      Make all web sites not require behaviour? This is a classic boiling the ocean solution.
myth_buster 9y ago
> 10x better than the ad-filled, [...] 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit Actually I see these on an AMP page too.
- nailer 9y ago
  Yep https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/ads/taboola.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/ads/tabool...
kavok 9y ago
On iOS I usually find AMP pages to be less usable. It forces a bar at the top and I can't easily share the link. Sometimes sites don't seem to work at all. For a long time any Reddit link on the Google Search results just didn't load on iOS for me. I run an adblocker and use reading mode frequently. I do not usually suffer any issues with ads even without AMP. It is solving a problem I do not have and creating more problems in the process.
- barsonme 9y ago
  Same here. Media (images, video, etc.) don't load at all and the site scrolls very quickly.
  - eclipxe 9y ago
    Get used to that scrolling. It is the new default in iOS11 (and a welcome change!)
- shostack 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on the Reddit issue? I experienced something similar (just a white page, no app opening, etc). Curious if this is the same thing.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I see it too. I think it's my content blocker (I use Firefox Focus). Easy enough workaround: tap the link icon at the top, then tap the link, and you'll open the page directly without Google's bullshit proxying. Still quite annoying, though. Any time I do a Google search and there's a choice of AMP and non-AMP results, I go for the non-AMP ones. I like having pages that load fast and aren't full of junk, but not as much as I like having pages that scroll properly.
  - kavok 9y ago
    Same thing.
boramalper 9y ago
> 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. You don't need AMP to get rid of them though. We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. I think we should give a critique of ourselves and ask why did we wait for a corporation G to push us to get rid of the bloat we created?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. Depends what you mean by technically superior. In terms of benchmarks, AMP pages are lightning fast. Isn't that the only metric that matters?
  - redial 9y ago
    On that same metric good old plain HTML is faster.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Well, sure. But HN is one of the few major websites that uses plain old HTML. At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat. What can we do about this situation?
      - accountyaccount 9y ago
        > At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat. I found that AMP helps a lot in that marketing/exec teams see Google pushing AMP and think they need AMP. My company built AMP equivalents, and honestly I wish we could ditch our entire React site for AMP. Instead of an exec demanding a feature, we can now say "AMP doesn't support it." No matter how many times we've set performance budgets, management absolutely tears the budgets down the second we need to implement some flashy new feature (which for some reason is the perceived solution to every sales slump). A group of us has tried to use data against this at least a handful of times, but memories seem to be short lived. Of course we need organizational change, but after pushing a stone up the hill over and over again you essentially just say "fuck it" and let it crush you. Bottom-up corporate change is a fool's errand.
CaptSpify 9y ago
I've always said: The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. It's the way that Google is trying to solve it that is a problem. What Google should be doing is encouraging the right designs, instead of pushing their own walled-garden design.
- dexterdog 9y ago
  Unfortunately encouraging better design won't do much to most of the web. You have to guide with a heavy hand.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I'd strongly disagree. If you hit them where it hurts, they'll change. I'll even argue that we haven't really tried encouraging sites to be better. If Google ranked load-time/page-bloat much heavier in their algorithm, and started punishing bad pages, then sites would adjust. I currently see very little action from Google in this direction.
    - acdha 9y ago
      Look at how successful the mobile-friendly push was at getting everyone from vaguely talking about responsive designs to doing it Right Now! Every user-visible benefit of AMP would happen following your comment – increase the weight for page load time/size and add a standard pre-fetch mechanism[1] which would close most of the gap for the CDN hosting. 1. i.e. the top n results will have rel=dns-prefetch tags hoisted into the search result, the top result (or visible/hover/etc.) will have the first rel=preload html/style/script tags hoisted.
forgotpwtomain 9y ago
> I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, Firefox on mobile supports extensions, so you can use UBlock Origin / UMatrix. Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience.
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  >Firefox on mobile supports extensions Unfortunately this isn't true on iOS as far as I can tell.
  - kavok 9y ago
    Safari on iOS supports adblockers
- heapoverflow 9y ago
  > Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience. True, but it doesn't improve page load times.
abritinthebay 9y ago
Speaking as someone who uses React: wut? My companies entire site JS, React and many other modules included, is 220kb over the wire (gzipped). Site bloat is a thing but it's due to bad developer practice not frameworks or libraries The single worst offender though for bloat are 3rd party ad networks - Google included/especially. The site often has minimal control over what is put in ad slots. Start pushing against google to improve their standards for ad payloads and you'll see a massive improvement. Railing against ads themselves however is, sadly, not too helpful
- kentt 9y ago
  It sounds like you use React well and it's reasonably light and performant. The current project I'm on has a React frontend where typing in a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. You're correct in saying that React is not to blame only it's misuse, however it is becoming a common cause of slowness.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    If it wasn't React it would be [insert any other framework here]. React isn't the cause - bad developer practice is. As you said - a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. That's not something that is going to be fixed by changing library.
- RonanTheGrey 9y ago
  As a predominantly frontend developer, I sometimes (just for giggles) check to see the page load of pages I visit. It always dismays me to see a site's own resources only take 200-500kb of bandwidth... and then all the ads and associated requests take another 25MB. It's quite common and I keep thinking there must be a better way..
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Well, there is - but consumers prefer free + ads to micro-payments or subscriptions. Granted there has been pushback recently but that's usually due to gross abuse of ads. The only realistic way that I see forward are the ad networks (and this includes Google) setting lower maximum payload sizes for ads. Obviously sites can push back on quality and size but it's a hard metric to track consistently given how ad networks serve things.
scott_karana 9y ago
AMP pages are regularly filled with garbage ads too. Try clicking any of the god-awful clickbait AMP pages shared on Facebook, for example.
enos_feedler 9y ago
Why not just fork AMP, call it openAMP and then rally around a roadmap that is more fair for the web platform at large (instead of just Google's)?
- kavok 9y ago
  Without Google behind it how would you drive adoption?
- nailer 9y ago
  Google won't let you into the carousel
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    Sounds ripe for a lawsuit
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Which is exactly why the EU has 3 (well, now 2) open antitrust cases against Google.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  I think that it would be better to use better practices in regular HTML. There doesn't need to be a new markup format -- just more restraint with JavaScript/animations/CSS/advertisements.
Alfredo123 9y ago
So true. Just trying visiting Forbes.com in firefox without adblockers and see how a premium website like that is horrible to load.
niutech 9y ago
Have more optimism. AMP is all about performance and fighting web bloat, which is a real problem nowadays. This is how a typical mobile web page looks like: https://i.redd.it/t6u12tcocx5z.jpg https://i.redd.it/t6u12tcocx5z.jpg and AMP is a radical but effective step towards the faster web. Additionally, AMP Cache loads content in less than no time and saves bandwidth and load on original servers, which reduces costs.
godzillabrennus 9y ago
Kind of like how selling socks shouldn't require a 60MB video autoloading. Yet http://www.sockfancy.com http://www.sockfancy.com has a huge video that automatically loads and plays on desktops.
codedokode 9y ago
Publishers want revenue, not fast sites. I think that is the root of the problem. Instead of AMP a better solution could be to add buttons to browser to disable JS/CSS/Web Fonts (the most useless innovation)/Cookies and let the user decide what they want to see.

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.
- mnm1 9y ago
  "We need to figure out how people can browse the web efficiently while ensuring websites are financially feasible" I'm trying to figure out how to make JS blocking available to normal end users. Why should users have to put up with the current shitty situation when a simple, technical solution is available that doesn't involve Google or anyone else whose intentions are not aligned with users' intentions? The main challenge is fixing the UI so that it can be used by the least computer literate users.
  - nailer 9y ago
    Make all web sites not require behaviour? This is a classic boiling the ocean solution.

myth_buster 9y ago

> 10x better than the ad-filled, [...] 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit Actually I see these on an AMP page too.

nailer 9y ago
Yep https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/ads/taboola.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/ads/tabool...

kavok 9y ago

On iOS I usually find AMP pages to be less usable. It forces a bar at the top and I can't easily share the link. Sometimes sites don't seem to work at all. For a long time any Reddit link on the Google Search results just didn't load on iOS for me. I run an adblocker and use reading mode frequently. I do not usually suffer any issues with ads even without AMP. It is solving a problem I do not have and creating more problems in the process.

barsonme 9y ago
Same here. Media (images, video, etc.) don't load at all and the site scrolls very quickly.
- eclipxe 9y ago
  Get used to that scrolling. It is the new default in iOS11 (and a welcome change!)
shostack 9y ago
Can you elaborate on the Reddit issue? I experienced something similar (just a white page, no app opening, etc). Curious if this is the same thing.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I see it too. I think it's my content blocker (I use Firefox Focus). Easy enough workaround: tap the link icon at the top, then tap the link, and you'll open the page directly without Google's bullshit proxying. Still quite annoying, though. Any time I do a Google search and there's a choice of AMP and non-AMP results, I go for the non-AMP ones. I like having pages that load fast and aren't full of junk, but not as much as I like having pages that scroll properly.
- kavok 9y ago
  Same thing.

boramalper 9y ago

> 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. You don't need AMP to get rid of them though. We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. I think we should give a critique of ourselves and ask why did we wait for a corporation G to push us to get rid of the bloat we created?

sillysaurus3 9y ago
We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. Depends what you mean by technically superior. In terms of benchmarks, AMP pages are lightning fast. Isn't that the only metric that matters?
- redial 9y ago
  On that same metric good old plain HTML is faster.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Well, sure. But HN is one of the few major websites that uses plain old HTML. At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat. What can we do about this situation?
    - accountyaccount 9y ago
      > At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat. I found that AMP helps a lot in that marketing/exec teams see Google pushing AMP and think they need AMP. My company built AMP equivalents, and honestly I wish we could ditch our entire React site for AMP. Instead of an exec demanding a feature, we can now say "AMP doesn't support it." No matter how many times we've set performance budgets, management absolutely tears the budgets down the second we need to implement some flashy new feature (which for some reason is the perceived solution to every sales slump). A group of us has tried to use data against this at least a handful of times, but memories seem to be short lived. Of course we need organizational change, but after pushing a stone up the hill over and over again you essentially just say "fuck it" and let it crush you. Bottom-up corporate change is a fool's errand.

CaptSpify 9y ago

I've always said: The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. It's the way that Google is trying to solve it that is a problem. What Google should be doing is encouraging the right designs, instead of pushing their own walled-garden design.

dexterdog 9y ago
Unfortunately encouraging better design won't do much to most of the web. You have to guide with a heavy hand.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I'd strongly disagree. If you hit them where it hurts, they'll change. I'll even argue that we haven't really tried encouraging sites to be better. If Google ranked load-time/page-bloat much heavier in their algorithm, and started punishing bad pages, then sites would adjust. I currently see very little action from Google in this direction.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Look at how successful the mobile-friendly push was at getting everyone from vaguely talking about responsive designs to doing it Right Now! Every user-visible benefit of AMP would happen following your comment – increase the weight for page load time/size and add a standard pre-fetch mechanism[1] which would close most of the gap for the CDN hosting. 1. i.e. the top n results will have rel=dns-prefetch tags hoisted into the search result, the top result (or visible/hover/etc.) will have the first rel=preload html/style/script tags hoisted.

forgotpwtomain 9y ago

> I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, Firefox on mobile supports extensions, so you can use UBlock Origin / UMatrix. Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience.

0xffff2 9y ago
>Firefox on mobile supports extensions Unfortunately this isn't true on iOS as far as I can tell.
- kavok 9y ago
  Safari on iOS supports adblockers
heapoverflow 9y ago
> Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience. True, but it doesn't improve page load times.

abritinthebay 9y ago

Speaking as someone who uses React: wut? My companies entire site JS, React and many other modules included, is 220kb over the wire (gzipped). Site bloat is a thing but it's due to bad developer practice not frameworks or libraries The single worst offender though for bloat are 3rd party ad networks - Google included/especially. The site often has minimal control over what is put in ad slots. Start pushing against google to improve their standards for ad payloads and you'll see a massive improvement. Railing against ads themselves however is, sadly, not too helpful

kentt 9y ago
It sounds like you use React well and it's reasonably light and performant. The current project I'm on has a React frontend where typing in a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. You're correct in saying that React is not to blame only it's misuse, however it is becoming a common cause of slowness.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  If it wasn't React it would be [insert any other framework here]. React isn't the cause - bad developer practice is. As you said - a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. That's not something that is going to be fixed by changing library.
RonanTheGrey 9y ago
As a predominantly frontend developer, I sometimes (just for giggles) check to see the page load of pages I visit. It always dismays me to see a site's own resources only take 200-500kb of bandwidth... and then all the ads and associated requests take another 25MB. It's quite common and I keep thinking there must be a better way..
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Well, there is - but consumers prefer free + ads to micro-payments or subscriptions. Granted there has been pushback recently but that's usually due to gross abuse of ads. The only realistic way that I see forward are the ad networks (and this includes Google) setting lower maximum payload sizes for ads. Obviously sites can push back on quality and size but it's a hard metric to track consistently given how ad networks serve things.

scott_karana 9y ago

AMP pages are regularly filled with garbage ads too. Try clicking any of the god-awful clickbait AMP pages shared on Facebook, for example.

enos_feedler 9y ago

Why not just fork AMP, call it openAMP and then rally around a roadmap that is more fair for the web platform at large (instead of just Google's)?

kavok 9y ago
Without Google behind it how would you drive adoption?
nailer 9y ago
Google won't let you into the carousel
- mi100hael 9y ago
  Sounds ripe for a lawsuit
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Which is exactly why the EU has 3 (well, now 2) open antitrust cases against Google.
JoshMnem 9y ago
I think that it would be better to use better practices in regular HTML. There doesn't need to be a new markup format -- just more restraint with JavaScript/animations/CSS/advertisements.

Alfredo123 9y ago

So true. Just trying visiting Forbes.com in firefox without adblockers and see how a premium website like that is horrible to load.

niutech 9y ago

Have more optimism. AMP is all about performance and fighting web bloat, which is a real problem nowadays. This is how a typical mobile web page looks like: https://i.redd.it/t6u12tcocx5z.jpg https://i.redd.it/t6u12tcocx5z.jpg and AMP is a radical but effective step towards the faster web. Additionally, AMP Cache loads content in less than no time and saves bandwidth and load on original servers, which reduces costs.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

Kind of like how selling socks shouldn't require a 60MB video autoloading. Yet http://www.sockfancy.com http://www.sockfancy.com has a huge video that automatically loads and plays on desktops.

codedokode 9y ago

Publishers want revenue, not fast sites. I think that is the root of the problem. Instead of AMP a better solution could be to add buttons to browser to disable JS/CSS/Web Fonts (the most useless innovation)/Cookies and let the user decide what they want to see.