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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 Goog

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.

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.