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Despite understanding and largely agreeing with the concerns against AMP Cache that get discussed any time an AMP article gets posted on HN, I cannot stress eno

Despite understanding and largely agreeing with the concerns against AMP Cache that get discussed any time an AMP article gets posted on HN, I cannot stress enough on how relieved I feel to see the lightning icon next to a mobile search result, especially on my now aging phone. Most content websites have become such a massive crapfest of ad-bloat, bad UX, huge page sizes and general usability hell that it's nigh impossible that I'd be able to reach the actual content of a non AMP site in the first 5-10 seconds of clicking on its link. (On my phone that's an additional 1-2 seconds for registering the tap, and 1-2 seconds for navigating to the browser) My click-throughs to non AMP websites have reduced considerably. So say what you may, AMP (or FB Instant or its ilk) will prosper until the mobile web experience stops being so crappy. (Edit: About a decade ago, when mobile browsers were in their infancy and data plans were slow and limited, I distinctly remember using Opera Mini for mobile browsing because it used to pre-render pages on the server and send a very light payload to the phone. This saved you both data costs and made mobile browsing even realistically possible)

dividuum 9y ago
Personally I don't think the idea behind AMP is bad. But the implementation is dangerous as it artificially fragments the web. I guess fewer would oppose AMP if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag.
- godot 9y ago
  >if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag. That is exactly what AMP is; with the exception (a huge one, I know) that Google also then caches the page on their server and serves it from a google.com host.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    And modifies the pages UI. And forces you to load content from Google’s CDN. And so on.
  - avaer 9y ago
    For Google, the hijack is the prime feature; AMP is the PR vehicle that makes it swallow. AMP could have been done without the huge exception, but then Google couldn't profit from it.
    - cobookman 9y ago
      I think it's also about prefetching amp pages from Google search. You can't do that without the cdn. Sure google could modify chrome to allow this and not block it. but you'd be asking for even more technical blockers. And you'd have something that only works for a small portion of the web.
      - avaer 9y ago
        Sounds like the perfect use case for a nice standard CORSy web prefetch API that all browsers could implement. And this would work for at least as much of the web as is currently putting effort into AMP.
        cramforce 9y ago
        We are thinking about this. The problem is privacy. AMP can pre-render a page from publisher X without publisher X learning that this happened. This is important for avoiding that you e.g. would suddenly see re-marketing ads for pages that you have never clicked.
    - baddox 9y ago
      Regardless of profit, if Google just made the AMP spec and didn't incentivize publishers to use it, well, no one would use it.
      - avaer 9y ago
        Not saying that's true, but if it is, wouldn't that mean AMP is not a desired product? I fully support a "faster page spec" that search engines incentivize, just like I support a ranking boost for using HTTPS. But AMP isn't that; AMP is incentivizing the payment of tribute data to Google under the veneer of a faster page spec, to steer the rhetoric more favorably for the company.
  - the8472 9y ago
    > That is exactly what AMP is Except that there is mandatory 3rd-party javascript that needs to be loaded just to get it to render. That doesn't make sense if it really just were about lean pages
  - grey-area 9y ago
    So, that's not what AMP is. There's a reason google don't drop the incredibly unpopular hijacking of content, and it's not to do with edge caching, but control.
  - ninkendo 9y ago
    That's an extremely disingenuous statement. It's not just "a [huge] exception", it's the entire basis for google's strategy. AMP isn't just a standard for how to construct a website, it's a way for external entities like Google to host your site directly inside their site, so that they have ever-increasing access to your browsing behavior. Now Google doesn't just know what results you clicked on, but what links you're following inside those results, how long you stay on the pages, etc. Facebook, twitter, reddit, etc already utilize similar techniques on their mobile apps to make it so "web links" you click just keep you in the app. But the web (as in, not bespoke mobile apps, but what you get in a general-purpose web browser) is supposed to be decentralized and resistant to any one entity owning the end-to-end experience. I'm aware that any other entity (like Bing for instance) could do the same thing that Google does, and that the AMP standard isn't what's at fault here, but there should be no doubt as to Google's motives.
  - stephenr 9y ago
    You don't need new js-required-to-render markup to make a page lightweight
- rhizome 9y ago
  With Google I can never relax to think that something new will be a good thing for me, a user, but their "make mobile viewable" (or whatever the message is) reformatter for sites that still have 10 year old CSS could certainly result in some sort of signal displayed in search results. A mobile-viewability indicator, perhaps. I dunno, it sounds kinda hokey when I write it out like that, but I have to think they're going to productize it at some point.
- mikeytown2 9y ago
  >if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". If you get a score above 95 or (X) on google page speed insights that might be a metric that everyone can agree on.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  I can't for the life of me understand why the icon couldn't just be a link to the AMP version (or be located near the current cached link is), and the link would link to the normal page
- stephenr 9y ago
  It's pretty easy to detect the number of external scripts, media objects, fonts and images a page attempts to load. But that wouldn't give google control and importantly, a sure-fire run around same-origin privacy protections.
anon1385 9y ago
I think that the fact AMP sites are faster than the average site is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Obviously there are plenty of sites out there that aren't bloated up with javascript and ads, but Google doesn't offer any way to identify that in the search results. The only reliable indicator of site speed is the Google AMP Cache logo. So naturally users will consciously or otherwise favour clicking results with the Google AMP logo. That drives more traffic to those sites, improves their search ranking etc. A non-GoogleAMPCache site could be incredibly lean and fast but it will still lose out to the Google AMP Cache hosted sites in terms of traffic and ranking. The only way to compete is to use Google's proprietary markup standard and cede hosting of your site to Google.
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  AMP isn’t that much faster, it’s still html, css and gobloads ofv js. The real speed increase is Google SERP sucking up your data plan and prerenders a whole loads of stuff without asking.
- vanadium 9y ago
  Well, here's an interesting data point to dig through insofar as AMP performance is concerned: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170816_7R_b596415003dabf347932f40e260e6629/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170816_7R_b596415003dabf34... Average Guardian article.
  - sdoering 9y ago
    So 80% is js bloat? How does that optimizes for my experience?
    - vanadium 9y ago
      But it's _their_ bloat.
PaulHoule 9y ago
It would go a long way to the reform of the mobile web if they got rid of all the "pop-in" windows that are hard (and sometimes impossible) to dismiss. Pop-ins are annoying on the desktop, but close to catastrophic on mobile.
sbov 9y ago
There's ways Google could fix this without AMP, such as factoring in total page weight when ranking mobile search results.
- dazc 9y ago
  Absolutely this.
- rolodato 9y ago
  It's not as simple as total page weight - latency and server throughput are also important. AMP pages are likely served from a fast global cache with low latency from all over the world.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Are you saying that global latency is not measurable?
- nallerooth 9y ago
  As mentioned by others, page weight is a bit tricky. However, Google has this thing called "Google Page Speed" and that would actually be a pretty good indication on the performance part. Then again - any site with good performance can be made unusable by crazy marketing people who wants [insert tracking tool here] on every page or similar.
JetSpiegel 9y ago
The same AMP experience can be had with Firefox and uBlock Origin on old Android phones.
hdhzy 9y ago
> Most content websites have become such a massive crapfest of ad-bloat, bad UX, huge page sizes and general usability hell that it's nigh impossible that I'd be able to reach the actual content of a non AMP site in the first 5-10 seconds of clicking on its link. Or just use Firefox for Android with uBlock extension and Reader Mode. No, it's not perfect but doesn't require parallel internet (Google's) to function. I hope AMP meets the same fate as other Google's "works best in chrome" techniques such as PNaCl. Maybe we'll get something standardized out of it like PNaCl was replaced with WebAssembly?
dimal 9y ago
The crazy thing is that content websites insist they need dozens of ad and analytics libraries on every page because otherwise, how would they monetize their site? So, they create a crappy experience, realize it's crappy, then switch to AMP, getting rid of all the libraries they supposedly "needed". They could just remove the cruft themselves and cut out the middleman.
- lllr_finger 9y ago
  In reality, they get scared of losing traffic by not adapting AMP, decide to implement it, and then flip out over how restrictive it is without understanding how they caused this situation. It's all driven by money, and unfortunately AMP and bloated pages make money - fast, sexy pages without AMP do not.
colordrops 9y ago
You aren't addressing the issue people have with AMP though. There's no reason Google couldn't boost site rankings and provide the little logo to compliant sitea and still allow the sites to host under their own domain.
owenversteeg 9y ago
I completely agree. As a programmer, I don't like it. As a user, I love it. I'm often on a crappy data connection or on an older device, and waiting for non-AMP pages to load is ridiculous. I'd usually choose the 10th search result over the 1st if the 10th is the first AMP one. (Provided that it looks suitable for whatever I was Googling.) It's that significant of an effect.
techmagus 9y ago
Same here. I can load sites with AMP (or its competitors) faster on my low-end to mid-range phones fine, and on a metered Internet connection. As much as I don't like it on a webmaster / blogger perspective, it does help a lot in getting a wider audience than by only offering a "responsive theme".
executesorder66 9y ago
Why not use Firefox with uBlock Origin addon for your phone?
deftturtle 9y ago
I just use a content blocker to prevent JS, CSS, fonts, and images on all websites by default. Then if I care about the site, I can change permissions. Medium.com now loads so fast, as well as other bloated publishers and newspapers. It's amazing how many tabs I can open, and I use so little bandwidth. I end using my phone's screen reader usually, so I don't care about appearance. Just need good stories in the <html> :)

dividuum 9y ago

Personally I don't think the idea behind AMP is bad. But the implementation is dangerous as it artificially fragments the web. I guess fewer would oppose AMP if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag.

godot 9y ago
>if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag. That is exactly what AMP is; with the exception (a huge one, I know) that Google also then caches the page on their server and serves it from a google.com host.
- kuschku 9y ago
  And modifies the pages UI. And forces you to load content from Google’s CDN. And so on.
- avaer 9y ago
  For Google, the hijack is the prime feature; AMP is the PR vehicle that makes it swallow. AMP could have been done without the huge exception, but then Google couldn't profit from it.
  - cobookman 9y ago
    I think it's also about prefetching amp pages from Google search. You can't do that without the cdn. Sure google could modify chrome to allow this and not block it. but you'd be asking for even more technical blockers. And you'd have something that only works for a small portion of the web.
    - avaer 9y ago
      Sounds like the perfect use case for a nice standard CORSy web prefetch API that all browsers could implement. And this would work for at least as much of the web as is currently putting effort into AMP.
      - cramforce 9y ago
        We are thinking about this. The problem is privacy. AMP can pre-render a page from publisher X without publisher X learning that this happened. This is important for avoiding that you e.g. would suddenly see re-marketing ads for pages that you have never clicked.
  - baddox 9y ago
    Regardless of profit, if Google just made the AMP spec and didn't incentivize publishers to use it, well, no one would use it.
    - avaer 9y ago
      Not saying that's true, but if it is, wouldn't that mean AMP is not a desired product? I fully support a "faster page spec" that search engines incentivize, just like I support a ranking boost for using HTTPS. But AMP isn't that; AMP is incentivizing the payment of tribute data to Google under the veneer of a faster page spec, to steer the rhetoric more favorably for the company.
- the8472 9y ago
  > That is exactly what AMP is Except that there is mandatory 3rd-party javascript that needs to be loaded just to get it to render. That doesn't make sense if it really just were about lean pages
- grey-area 9y ago
  So, that's not what AMP is. There's a reason google don't drop the incredibly unpopular hijacking of content, and it's not to do with edge caching, but control.
- ninkendo 9y ago
  That's an extremely disingenuous statement. It's not just "a [huge] exception", it's the entire basis for google's strategy. AMP isn't just a standard for how to construct a website, it's a way for external entities like Google to host your site directly inside their site, so that they have ever-increasing access to your browsing behavior. Now Google doesn't just know what results you clicked on, but what links you're following inside those results, how long you stay on the pages, etc. Facebook, twitter, reddit, etc already utilize similar techniques on their mobile apps to make it so "web links" you click just keep you in the app. But the web (as in, not bespoke mobile apps, but what you get in a general-purpose web browser) is supposed to be decentralized and resistant to any one entity owning the end-to-end experience. I'm aware that any other entity (like Bing for instance) could do the same thing that Google does, and that the AMP standard isn't what's at fault here, but there should be no doubt as to Google's motives.
- stephenr 9y ago
  You don't need new js-required-to-render markup to make a page lightweight
rhizome 9y ago
With Google I can never relax to think that something new will be a good thing for me, a user, but their "make mobile viewable" (or whatever the message is) reformatter for sites that still have 10 year old CSS could certainly result in some sort of signal displayed in search results. A mobile-viewability indicator, perhaps. I dunno, it sounds kinda hokey when I write it out like that, but I have to think they're going to productize it at some point.
mikeytown2 9y ago
>if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". If you get a score above 95 or (X) on google page speed insights that might be a metric that everyone can agree on.
BoorishBears 9y ago
I can't for the life of me understand why the icon couldn't just be a link to the AMP version (or be located near the current cached link is), and the link would link to the normal page
stephenr 9y ago
It's pretty easy to detect the number of external scripts, media objects, fonts and images a page attempts to load. But that wouldn't give google control and importantly, a sure-fire run around same-origin privacy protections.

anon1385 9y ago

I think that the fact AMP sites are faster than the average site is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Obviously there are plenty of sites out there that aren't bloated up with javascript and ads, but Google doesn't offer any way to identify that in the search results. The only reliable indicator of site speed is the Google AMP Cache logo. So naturally users will consciously or otherwise favour clicking results with the Google AMP logo. That drives more traffic to those sites, improves their search ranking etc. A non-GoogleAMPCache site could be incredibly lean and fast but it will still lose out to the Google AMP Cache hosted sites in terms of traffic and ranking. The only way to compete is to use Google's proprietary markup standard and cede hosting of your site to Google.

andy_ppp 9y ago
AMP isn’t that much faster, it’s still html, css and gobloads ofv js. The real speed increase is Google SERP sucking up your data plan and prerenders a whole loads of stuff without asking.
vanadium 9y ago
Well, here's an interesting data point to dig through insofar as AMP performance is concerned: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170816_7R_b596415003dabf347932f40e260e6629/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170816_7R_b596415003dabf34... Average Guardian article.
- sdoering 9y ago
  So 80% is js bloat? How does that optimizes for my experience?
  - vanadium 9y ago
    But it's _their_ bloat.

PaulHoule 9y ago

It would go a long way to the reform of the mobile web if they got rid of all the "pop-in" windows that are hard (and sometimes impossible) to dismiss. Pop-ins are annoying on the desktop, but close to catastrophic on mobile.

sbov 9y ago

There's ways Google could fix this without AMP, such as factoring in total page weight when ranking mobile search results.

dazc 9y ago
Absolutely this.
rolodato 9y ago
It's not as simple as total page weight - latency and server throughput are also important. AMP pages are likely served from a fast global cache with low latency from all over the world.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Are you saying that global latency is not measurable?
nallerooth 9y ago
As mentioned by others, page weight is a bit tricky. However, Google has this thing called "Google Page Speed" and that would actually be a pretty good indication on the performance part. Then again - any site with good performance can be made unusable by crazy marketing people who wants [insert tracking tool here] on every page or similar.

JetSpiegel 9y ago

The same AMP experience can be had with Firefox and uBlock Origin on old Android phones.

hdhzy 9y ago

> Most content websites have become such a massive crapfest of ad-bloat, bad UX, huge page sizes and general usability hell that it's nigh impossible that I'd be able to reach the actual content of a non AMP site in the first 5-10 seconds of clicking on its link. Or just use Firefox for Android with uBlock extension and Reader Mode. No, it's not perfect but doesn't require parallel internet (Google's) to function. I hope AMP meets the same fate as other Google's "works best in chrome" techniques such as PNaCl. Maybe we'll get something standardized out of it like PNaCl was replaced with WebAssembly?

dimal 9y ago

The crazy thing is that content websites insist they need dozens of ad and analytics libraries on every page because otherwise, how would they monetize their site? So, they create a crappy experience, realize it's crappy, then switch to AMP, getting rid of all the libraries they supposedly "needed". They could just remove the cruft themselves and cut out the middleman.

lllr_finger 9y ago
In reality, they get scared of losing traffic by not adapting AMP, decide to implement it, and then flip out over how restrictive it is without understanding how they caused this situation. It's all driven by money, and unfortunately AMP and bloated pages make money - fast, sexy pages without AMP do not.

colordrops 9y ago

You aren't addressing the issue people have with AMP though. There's no reason Google couldn't boost site rankings and provide the little logo to compliant sitea and still allow the sites to host under their own domain.

owenversteeg 9y ago

I completely agree. As a programmer, I don't like it. As a user, I love it. I'm often on a crappy data connection or on an older device, and waiting for non-AMP pages to load is ridiculous. I'd usually choose the 10th search result over the 1st if the 10th is the first AMP one. (Provided that it looks suitable for whatever I was Googling.) It's that significant of an effect.

techmagus 9y ago

Same here. I can load sites with AMP (or its competitors) faster on my low-end to mid-range phones fine, and on a metered Internet connection. As much as I don't like it on a webmaster / blogger perspective, it does help a lot in getting a wider audience than by only offering a "responsive theme".

executesorder66 9y ago

Why not use Firefox with uBlock Origin addon for your phone?

deftturtle 9y ago

I just use a content blocker to prevent JS, CSS, fonts, and images on all websites by default. Then if I care about the site, I can change permissions. Medium.com now loads so fast, as well as other bloated publishers and newspapers. It's amazing how many tabs I can open, and I use so little bandwidth. I end using my phone's screen reader usually, so I don't care about appearance. Just need good stories in the <html> :)