3 ms·

Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's

Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP.

JoshMnem 9y ago
AMP is terrible for the open WWW and not necessarily any faster. "Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  "Look, my tests prove that your lived experience is wrong." Yes, it's possible to create fast mobile pages without AMP. So if that's true, why does AMP make such a big difference to so many consumers? The bottom line is that the theoretical possibility of fast non-AMP pages is meaningless to consumers if few content providers actually act on that possibility. What matters is what happens in the real world.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    Those who would trade small increases in speed for the destruction of the WWW are making a huge mistake.
    - recursive 9y ago
      It's not a small increase. It's an order of magnitude. Maybe two.
      - JoshMnem 9y ago
        Part of the problem is that most mobile browsers don't allow browser extensions to block all the JS bloat. There are other ways to fix the problem that won't destroy the open WWW.
        recursive 9y ago
        There are theoretical ones. If you can implement a practical one, or tell me how to do it, then I'll avoid AMP. Until then, I'll keep preferring AMP links.
- prophesi 9y ago
  Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages. I wish AMP simply wasn't a thing, and they put more effort in promoting progressive web apps (PWA's) instead. There's too much tie-in to Google on the internet already. AMP is basically "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's a subset of HTML/CSS that not even YOU can eff up." PWA is "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's the industry's best practices for mobile-first development."
  - HelloMcFly 9y ago
    > Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages. But people didn't, and here we are. Again, as a normal user, I'm relieved to see the AMP symbol. I click on those links first, to the exclusion of others given the chance, because multiple years of trust have been broken.
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      It's at the expense of the publishers and the future of the open WWW though.
      - HelloMcFly 9y ago
        I know that's the concern, but at the moment it feels like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Hypotheticals don't interest me because there's a million of them, and there's a thousand of them that can make sense if you look at the right way. Maybe the preponderance of AMP will create a shift back to the user experience, and AMP's success renders it unnecessary. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe I'll rue the day I wrote this, but we're going to have to see. This is a self-created problem, and now publishers of all stripes will have to work to earn back the trust they poisoned.
FridgeSeal 9y ago
If you can convince marketers to stop loading up pages with nigh endless amounts of tracking, tag managers and dozens of ad units (from all different sources) then I'm sure we'd see an immediate increase in page performance. (I suspect many sites are already quite fast before they get weighed back down by marketing) Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.
- nobleach 9y ago
  I like this answer so much better than mine, I should go and delete mine! Ask any shopping site how many tracking pixels, analytics scripts, etc that they have included. They'll tell you they're all necessary.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    Nah don't delete yours - I think it's equally valid, because yours talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      > talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions. Google is a company, its motivation is profit. Did you really expect otherwise? Do you really think Facebook wants to "make the world more connected"? Where do (or would) you put your savings? Let me guess, in the assets that provide the best return/risk? Why do you expect that the companies you're investing in expecting the highest returns would act in any different way?
      - nobleach 9y ago
        I certainly don't begrudge them a single dime of profit. Just using their position as "the de-factor search engine" to hype the sites using _their_ tech is a sleazy move. They spent years positioning themselves as the best search engine... and why? Because when you looked for something, you found it, usually within the first 3 or 4 results. Now, those results aren't really the most relevant, they're the ones with the home field advantage. So no, I never bought into that "don't be evil" garbage... but, I don't like them having the position and weight that they do.
nobleach 9y ago
"Better" is a very subject term. "Loads faster" is fair. Google has made things load faster by forcing apps to be stripped down (nearly useless for anything outside landing page or news sites) and heavily caching them. Given the same constraints for any app, we could load and perform with similar characteristics. Furthermore, Google prioritizing AMP search results just because they use the technology, means Google should no longer be trusted as the "best" search results.
chipotle_coyote 9y ago
At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere. I understand the usability case for AMP, but let's face it -- making a mobile-friendly web site really isn't that difficult, as long as you're not insisting on jamming things up with untold megabytes of JS woo. Google's argument to publishers is essentially "jam up your desktop sites with whatever JS woo you want, and let us unjam the mobile site for you." And, you know, fine, but to take advantage of it, you're essentially tailoring your web site to let Google reformat your content in a similar fashion to Safari Reader -- and, unlike Reader, Google is doing it by rehosting your content. They get the clicks, and you get whatever analytics and revenue they deign to share with you. And worse, that opens up the strong potential for Google's search results to penalize those of us who would rather maintain control over our own content.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere. You need to load the page first to do that.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Not anymore. In iOS 11 you'll be able to set certain sites to always default into Reeder about.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      And how would that happen? 1) iOS loads the full site, displays it in reader mode? 2) Some server (Apple's?) fetches the site, strips it down to reader mode, iOS fetches it from that server? #1 requires downloading the full site. #2 is just using an old "reformat pages for mobile" proxy.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
All Google had to do to fix this was move slow sites down in search results. Instead we ended up with this huge walled garden
geocar 9y ago
> Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's a hard problem. Having everyone use Google as a proxy and content server, trusting them to deliver ads and so on, is one way to improve quality of service, but it's a way that's hostile to publishers and infringes on the privacy of users, so the industry absolutely hungry for a solution here. A major issue is that Google acts as a gatekeeper for competing products, so we're unlikely to see any effect unless high profile publishers take a stand, or we individuals lobby our government to intercede. > It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP. I know. Ben Franklin warned us in a way about convenience, so his words seem quite appropriate here; I value my quality of life and my privacy, and I see it as such a slippery slope, so I don't implement AMP on my properties. My organic Google traffic has admittedly suffered since the AMP logo program started, but focusing on making my sponsored search buy stickier has proven a lot more valuable to me fiscally, while allowing me to preserve my morality.

JoshMnem 9y ago

AMP is terrible for the open WWW and not necessarily any faster. "Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

TulliusCicero 9y ago
"Look, my tests prove that your lived experience is wrong." Yes, it's possible to create fast mobile pages without AMP. So if that's true, why does AMP make such a big difference to so many consumers? The bottom line is that the theoretical possibility of fast non-AMP pages is meaningless to consumers if few content providers actually act on that possibility. What matters is what happens in the real world.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Those who would trade small increases in speed for the destruction of the WWW are making a huge mistake.
  - recursive 9y ago
    It's not a small increase. It's an order of magnitude. Maybe two.
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      Part of the problem is that most mobile browsers don't allow browser extensions to block all the JS bloat. There are other ways to fix the problem that won't destroy the open WWW.
      - recursive 9y ago
        There are theoretical ones. If you can implement a practical one, or tell me how to do it, then I'll avoid AMP. Until then, I'll keep preferring AMP links.
prophesi 9y ago
Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages. I wish AMP simply wasn't a thing, and they put more effort in promoting progressive web apps (PWA's) instead. There's too much tie-in to Google on the internet already. AMP is basically "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's a subset of HTML/CSS that not even YOU can eff up." PWA is "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's the industry's best practices for mobile-first development."
- HelloMcFly 9y ago
  > Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages. But people didn't, and here we are. Again, as a normal user, I'm relieved to see the AMP symbol. I click on those links first, to the exclusion of others given the chance, because multiple years of trust have been broken.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    It's at the expense of the publishers and the future of the open WWW though.
    - HelloMcFly 9y ago
      I know that's the concern, but at the moment it feels like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Hypotheticals don't interest me because there's a million of them, and there's a thousand of them that can make sense if you look at the right way. Maybe the preponderance of AMP will create a shift back to the user experience, and AMP's success renders it unnecessary. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe I'll rue the day I wrote this, but we're going to have to see. This is a self-created problem, and now publishers of all stripes will have to work to earn back the trust they poisoned.

FridgeSeal 9y ago

If you can convince marketers to stop loading up pages with nigh endless amounts of tracking, tag managers and dozens of ad units (from all different sources) then I'm sure we'd see an immediate increase in page performance. (I suspect many sites are already quite fast before they get weighed back down by marketing) Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.

nobleach 9y ago
I like this answer so much better than mine, I should go and delete mine! Ask any shopping site how many tracking pixels, analytics scripts, etc that they have included. They'll tell you they're all necessary.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  Nah don't delete yours - I think it's equally valid, because yours talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    > talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions. Google is a company, its motivation is profit. Did you really expect otherwise? Do you really think Facebook wants to "make the world more connected"? Where do (or would) you put your savings? Let me guess, in the assets that provide the best return/risk? Why do you expect that the companies you're investing in expecting the highest returns would act in any different way?
    - nobleach 9y ago
      I certainly don't begrudge them a single dime of profit. Just using their position as "the de-factor search engine" to hype the sites using _their_ tech is a sleazy move. They spent years positioning themselves as the best search engine... and why? Because when you looked for something, you found it, usually within the first 3 or 4 results. Now, those results aren't really the most relevant, they're the ones with the home field advantage. So no, I never bought into that "don't be evil" garbage... but, I don't like them having the position and weight that they do.

nobleach 9y ago

"Better" is a very subject term. "Loads faster" is fair. Google has made things load faster by forcing apps to be stripped down (nearly useless for anything outside landing page or news sites) and heavily caching them. Given the same constraints for any app, we could load and perform with similar characteristics. Furthermore, Google prioritizing AMP search results just because they use the technology, means Google should no longer be trusted as the "best" search results.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago

At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere. I understand the usability case for AMP, but let's face it -- making a mobile-friendly web site really isn't that difficult, as long as you're not insisting on jamming things up with untold megabytes of JS woo. Google's argument to publishers is essentially "jam up your desktop sites with whatever JS woo you want, and let us unjam the mobile site for you." And, you know, fine, but to take advantage of it, you're essentially tailoring your web site to let Google reformat your content in a similar fashion to Safari Reader -- and, unlike Reader, Google is doing it by rehosting your content. They get the clicks, and you get whatever analytics and revenue they deign to share with you. And worse, that opens up the strong potential for Google's search results to penalize those of us who would rather maintain control over our own content.

ucaetano 9y ago
> At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere. You need to load the page first to do that.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Not anymore. In iOS 11 you'll be able to set certain sites to always default into Reeder about.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    And how would that happen? 1) iOS loads the full site, displays it in reader mode? 2) Some server (Apple's?) fetches the site, strips it down to reader mode, iOS fetches it from that server? #1 requires downloading the full site. #2 is just using an old "reformat pages for mobile" proxy.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

All Google had to do to fix this was move slow sites down in search results. Instead we ended up with this huge walled garden

geocar 9y ago

> Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's a hard problem. Having everyone use Google as a proxy and content server, trusting them to deliver ads and so on, is one way to improve quality of service, but it's a way that's hostile to publishers and infringes on the privacy of users, so the industry absolutely hungry for a solution here. A major issue is that Google acts as a gatekeeper for competing products, so we're unlikely to see any effect unless high profile publishers take a stand, or we individuals lobby our government to intercede. > It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP. I know. Ben Franklin warned us in a way about convenience, so his words seem quite appropriate here; I value my quality of life and my privacy, and I see it as such a slippery slope, so I don't implement AMP on my properties. My organic Google traffic has admittedly suffered since the AMP logo program started, but focusing on making my sponsored search buy stickier has proven a lot more valuable to me fiscally, while allowing me to preserve my morality.