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Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested. TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Pre-rendering achieves the performance but r

Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested. TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin as the search page. We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate those trade offs. More coming soon, including lots of improvements to Safari. My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affect AMP (but also the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech).

Waterluvian 9y ago
I've heard so much negative feedback about AMP that I'm not sure I have the full story. What link(s) would you recommend someone review if they wanted to build their own informed decision on the merits of this technology?
- cramforce 9y ago
  https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-full-advantage-of-the-preload-scanner-7e7f788aa94e https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-ful... People here are opinionated about it, but users love it.
  - agildehaus 9y ago
    Users loved AOL keywords. Here we discuss technical merit.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      I actually think AOL keywords worked fantastically.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    When will I be able to get into the AMP carousel without having to import the AMP script from Google’s servers? I’d prefer hosting all JS locally. (Or at least within of EU jurisdiction, as Privacy Shield is likely going to fall in the courts, too, as Safe Harbor did before, and I don't want to end up liable for that (and I don't want to sell out my users to some foreign tracking company))
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I'm a user. I DON'T love it. Why isn't my voice respected? In fact all the people here are users. Funny how that works.
    - fgadhksf 9y ago
      I also definitely don’t love AMP.
    - weirdstuff 9y ago
      I really dislike it as well, as I think a sizable portion of the HN does according to these threads that occasionally appear. You're in good company.
    - eclipxe 9y ago
      I love AMP, throwing my voice in the ring.
  - dwrowe 9y ago
    People here are users too. Unique culture, sure - but this audience counts.
  - johnvaluk 9y ago
    Today is the first time I've heard of AMP, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. I visited each of your links and followed some links on those pages, and I still have no idea what AMP is. All I see is a promise that pages will load faster. It also seems that if my boss drinks the koolaid and says "We need AMP!" it's going to cost me money in developer time, because the technology is inscrutable to my unskilled content providers. What benefits does it provide that disciplined web design doesn't? Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
    - sp332 9y ago
      AMP is mostly a series of guidelines. https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ If your site follows the guidelines, it will be fast. If you also voluntarily add a bit of JS to your page, Google (and other sites, but mostly Google) will cache your article and deliver it from their own CDN instead of loading it from your site. They won't interfere with your ads if you have them set up right. The trouble is that the URL is now a Google URL and Google puts links to more Google pages at the top of the interface instead of other links to your articles. So, instead of actually using AMP, you could just follow the AMP guidelines and get most of the speed benefits with almost no downsides. But Google started prioritizing AMP pages in search results, so now there's a downside either way.
    - cramforce 9y ago
      https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/ https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/ is a good primer. You can beat AMP's performance with hand-tuned optimizations. Its goal is to uplift performance across a significant percentage of web content (instead of just that developed by the few experts). Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? No, AMP is not a ranking factor. We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP? Advertising is to AMP like Advertising is to the Web. E-commerce is a big use case where advertising is uncommon.
      - SquareWheel 9y ago
        Hi cramforce, I understand that AMP is not a ranking factor (except for its inherent speed, perhaps). However, is there not a carousal at the top of SERPs for pages in your AMP Cache? So while not an organic ranking factor, it would still affect SEO. Is that a fair comment? Or am I missing another perspective?
- russjr08 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat. To me as a user, AMP has worked well. Loads content quickly, with from what I've experienced, very little drawbacks. So I'm not sure whether AMP is just something controversial as a lot of things from Google tend to be it seems, or if there is some real technical merit as to why it's so bad apparently.
jacquesm 9y ago
> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are reallty interested. This is not about technology. And whatever goal the AMP project states it has could have been achieved - and better - in other ways, such as the suggestion elsewhere in this thread to simply penalize page weight. If people wanted a consistent user interface across all websites they would have stuck with Videotext. > TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Yes, so was the search engine that put each result page in an iframe. Only difference was they didn't have a monopoly on search. And it does not make it right. > Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin as the search page. Minor technical details, not relevant. If you feel the AMP discussion is going to be swayed by technical bits you're simply out of touch. > We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. Who made you the deciders of what the UX of the web should look like? Stick to generating the best search results rather than trying to co-opt the entire web one little bit at the time and leave the UX to the browsers, it would seem you have enough input there already. > Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate those trade offs. The only trade-off that will satisfy me is AMP dying off because websites will stop to support it. But as long as Google is strong-arming content providers to use AMP that won't happen. It is no longer fair play as far as Google is concerned. If it ever was. > My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affects AMP (but also the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech). Consider doing something more useful with your talents. For instance, fix the long standing issue with the SERPs that makes it impossible to cut-and-paste URLs pointing to PDFs.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  This post feels overly agressive and hyperbolic. There's no need to insult their job or bring out the accusations about the reasoning behind AMP.
  - wwweston 9y ago
    I also often find that discussion of motives is murky territory but: * The post it's replying to admitted motives behind those critical of AMP to the discussion. * The idea that page weight is a problem best solved by a solution like AMP is hostile enough to the principles the web is based on that it's hard to bar either motive or outright thoughtlessness from the discussion. Defenses on either front are also admissible.
perpetualcrayon 9y ago
I'm not certain about this, but my thinking at the moment is that as soon as you need to ask a browser vendor to change their code to accomodate your design decisions, it looks a lot less like the "open" web, and a lot more like something else.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
brodie 9y ago
Is someone working on allowing users to opt out of AMP when viewing search results? For users whose internet connections are fast and who cannot tolerate the browser UX being broken (can't copy URL out of address bar, back button doesn't always work properly, web pages often don't have comments, the list goes on and on seemingly forever). Also, is someone working on a successor to AMP that doesn't break or try to replace the browser's own UI? Maybe something done at a lower level, maybe the HTTPS level? E.g., I could imagine something where the browser is informed that www.google.com is loading/proxying a web page on the user's behalf, and through some kind of verification system, it determines the website has given www.google.com permission to do so, and the browser UI updates itself to show the right address in the URL, etc. Maybe there's a better way to do all that, just one idea off the top of my head that seems infinitely better than AMP from a UX perspective. Though it'd also be nice if you could get websites to make their actual main sites faster for everyone, maybe using a method like jacquesm suggested. That coupled with the low level proxying might be a nice alternative to what we have now.
e1ven 9y ago
I appreciate the info! I'm really curious to see where using AMP as a proxy speeds up the page, versus applying similar optimizations on origin server? If it's a cached page (served from any normal CDN), and crafted with similar optimizations [1] wouldn't it be just as fast, without needing to do the URL redirection? Even if it were difficult to convince developers to implement the changes, couldn't many of the optimizations could be rolled into a module like PageSpeed [2]? [1] - https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/ Edit - Reformatted links; I forgot HN doesn't use Markdown.
- cramforce 9y ago
  Our latest numbers show that the average speed improvement of the AMP cache is roughly 75%. I'm a bit shocked by that myself. But that is where it stands. Getting similar performance out of on-origin serving is a priority for us, but we aren't there yet. One challenge is to give it the same scale as the AMP cache.
  - nwellnhof 9y ago
    Could you at least make it possible for websites to opt out of the AMP cache? Last time I checked, publishing an AMP page grants Google (and everyone else) an implicit license to incorporate your content on their own web properties. The AMP FAQ say: "Should you desire not to have your document cached, one option is to remove the amp attribute from the HTML tag. This makes the document technically invalid AMP, while not impacting the functionality of the document." But from what I understand, this will also impact the presentation and ranking in search results.
saurik 9y ago
You can do the rendering, even within an iframe, on iOS (where iframes have an amazing quirk of resizing automatically) without messing with scrolling (both vertical velocity and horizontal swipes) and breaking the browser's on-page search (which is extremely annoying); in fact, it is so easy to pull this stuff off on iOS (again: in no small part due to the epic iframe quirk) that it kind of comes off like you just don't care.
pryce 9y ago
> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested. Criticism of AMP certainly includes technical aspects, but most objections I encounter are ethical rather than technical. Did Google explicitly consider ethical considerations when creating and launching AMP? If so, what did this process look like, and where could we find out more? If not, isn't it time we expected ethical review to be part of significant changes in web infrastructure, the same way we would with significant changes in physical infrastructure?
- izacus 9y ago
  Funny how literaly tens of behavioural trackers on sites that follow you everywhere, abuse holes in browser sandboxes to steal private data and try to install malware did not bring quarter of vitrol here on HN. More, bunch of people defended that as "we need to make profit". Now that someone got rid of that it's suddenly an "ethical issue"?!
  - 0x8BADF00D 9y ago
    It's an ethical issue because I can easily block ads and malware. I cannot opt out of AMP if I use Google as my primary search engine. It's about market power.
  - pryce 9y ago
    We have somewhat different expectations of Google than malware sites, because we expect it to act as a good net citizen, and a thoughtful custodian of its enormous power to shape the future of our culture. The risk critics are concerned about here is a future where the internet no longer "belongs" to the people on it anymore, and despite the malicious nature of the abuses you named, they hardly represented that class of threat.
Aaargh20318 9y ago
> We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. So basically the argument boils down to "because I have shit internet, everyone else should suffer too".

Waterluvian 9y ago

I've heard so much negative feedback about AMP that I'm not sure I have the full story. What link(s) would you recommend someone review if they wanted to build their own informed decision on the merits of this technology?

cramforce 9y ago
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-full-advantage-of-the-preload-scanner-7e7f788aa94e https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-ful... People here are opinionated about it, but users love it.
- agildehaus 9y ago
  Users loved AOL keywords. Here we discuss technical merit.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I actually think AOL keywords worked fantastically.
- kuschku 9y ago
  When will I be able to get into the AMP carousel without having to import the AMP script from Google’s servers? I’d prefer hosting all JS locally. (Or at least within of EU jurisdiction, as Privacy Shield is likely going to fall in the courts, too, as Safe Harbor did before, and I don't want to end up liable for that (and I don't want to sell out my users to some foreign tracking company))
- MBCook 9y ago
  I'm a user. I DON'T love it. Why isn't my voice respected? In fact all the people here are users. Funny how that works.
  - fgadhksf 9y ago
    I also definitely don’t love AMP.
  - weirdstuff 9y ago
    I really dislike it as well, as I think a sizable portion of the HN does according to these threads that occasionally appear. You're in good company.
  - eclipxe 9y ago
    I love AMP, throwing my voice in the ring.
- dwrowe 9y ago
  People here are users too. Unique culture, sure - but this audience counts.
- johnvaluk 9y ago
  Today is the first time I've heard of AMP, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. I visited each of your links and followed some links on those pages, and I still have no idea what AMP is. All I see is a promise that pages will load faster. It also seems that if my boss drinks the koolaid and says "We need AMP!" it's going to cost me money in developer time, because the technology is inscrutable to my unskilled content providers. What benefits does it provide that disciplined web design doesn't? Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
  - sp332 9y ago
    AMP is mostly a series of guidelines. https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ If your site follows the guidelines, it will be fast. If you also voluntarily add a bit of JS to your page, Google (and other sites, but mostly Google) will cache your article and deliver it from their own CDN instead of loading it from your site. They won't interfere with your ads if you have them set up right. The trouble is that the URL is now a Google URL and Google puts links to more Google pages at the top of the interface instead of other links to your articles. So, instead of actually using AMP, you could just follow the AMP guidelines and get most of the speed benefits with almost no downsides. But Google started prioritizing AMP pages in search results, so now there's a downside either way.
  - cramforce 9y ago
    https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/ https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/ is a good primer. You can beat AMP's performance with hand-tuned optimizations. Its goal is to uplift performance across a significant percentage of web content (instead of just that developed by the few experts). Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? No, AMP is not a ranking factor. We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP? Advertising is to AMP like Advertising is to the Web. E-commerce is a big use case where advertising is uncommon.
    - SquareWheel 9y ago
      Hi cramforce, I understand that AMP is not a ranking factor (except for its inherent speed, perhaps). However, is there not a carousal at the top of SERPs for pages in your AMP Cache? So while not an organic ranking factor, it would still affect SEO. Is that a fair comment? Or am I missing another perspective?
russjr08 9y ago
I'm in the same boat. To me as a user, AMP has worked well. Loads content quickly, with from what I've experienced, very little drawbacks. So I'm not sure whether AMP is just something controversial as a lot of things from Google tend to be it seems, or if there is some real technical merit as to why it's so bad apparently.

jacquesm 9y ago

> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are reallty interested. This is not about technology. And whatever goal the AMP project states it has could have been achieved - and better - in other ways, such as the suggestion elsewhere in this thread to simply penalize page weight. If people wanted a consistent user interface across all websites they would have stuck with Videotext. > TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Yes, so was the search engine that put each result page in an iframe. Only difference was they didn't have a monopoly on search. And it does not make it right. > Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin as the search page. Minor technical details, not relevant. If you feel the AMP discussion is going to be swayed by technical bits you're simply out of touch. > We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. Who made you the deciders of what the UX of the web should look like? Stick to generating the best search results rather than trying to co-opt the entire web one little bit at the time and leave the UX to the browsers, it would seem you have enough input there already. > Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate those trade offs. The only trade-off that will satisfy me is AMP dying off because websites will stop to support it. But as long as Google is strong-arming content providers to use AMP that won't happen. It is no longer fair play as far as Google is concerned. If it ever was. > My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affects AMP (but also the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech). Consider doing something more useful with your talents. For instance, fix the long standing issue with the SERPs that makes it impossible to cut-and-paste URLs pointing to PDFs.

Klathmon 9y ago
This post feels overly agressive and hyperbolic. There's no need to insult their job or bring out the accusations about the reasoning behind AMP.
- wwweston 9y ago
  I also often find that discussion of motives is murky territory but: * The post it's replying to admitted motives behind those critical of AMP to the discussion. * The idea that page weight is a problem best solved by a solution like AMP is hostile enough to the principles the web is based on that it's hard to bar either motive or outright thoughtlessness from the discussion. Defenses on either front are also admissible.

perpetualcrayon 9y ago

I'm not certain about this, but my thinking at the moment is that as soon as you need to ask a browser vendor to change their code to accomodate your design decisions, it looks a lot less like the "open" web, and a lot more like something else.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

brodie 9y ago

Is someone working on allowing users to opt out of AMP when viewing search results? For users whose internet connections are fast and who cannot tolerate the browser UX being broken (can't copy URL out of address bar, back button doesn't always work properly, web pages often don't have comments, the list goes on and on seemingly forever). Also, is someone working on a successor to AMP that doesn't break or try to replace the browser's own UI? Maybe something done at a lower level, maybe the HTTPS level? E.g., I could imagine something where the browser is informed that www.google.com is loading/proxying a web page on the user's behalf, and through some kind of verification system, it determines the website has given www.google.com permission to do so, and the browser UI updates itself to show the right address in the URL, etc. Maybe there's a better way to do all that, just one idea off the top of my head that seems infinitely better than AMP from a UX perspective. Though it'd also be nice if you could get websites to make their actual main sites faster for everyone, maybe using a method like jacquesm suggested. That coupled with the low level proxying might be a nice alternative to what we have now.

e1ven 9y ago

I appreciate the info! I'm really curious to see where using AMP as a proxy speeds up the page, versus applying similar optimizations on origin server? If it's a cached page (served from any normal CDN), and crafted with similar optimizations [1] wouldn't it be just as fast, without needing to do the URL redirection? Even if it were difficult to convince developers to implement the changes, couldn't many of the optimizations could be rolled into a module like PageSpeed [2]? [1] - https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/ Edit - Reformatted links; I forgot HN doesn't use Markdown.

cramforce 9y ago
Our latest numbers show that the average speed improvement of the AMP cache is roughly 75%. I'm a bit shocked by that myself. But that is where it stands. Getting similar performance out of on-origin serving is a priority for us, but we aren't there yet. One challenge is to give it the same scale as the AMP cache.
- nwellnhof 9y ago
  Could you at least make it possible for websites to opt out of the AMP cache? Last time I checked, publishing an AMP page grants Google (and everyone else) an implicit license to incorporate your content on their own web properties. The AMP FAQ say: "Should you desire not to have your document cached, one option is to remove the amp attribute from the HTML tag. This makes the document technically invalid AMP, while not impacting the functionality of the document." But from what I understand, this will also impact the presentation and ranking in search results.

saurik 9y ago

You can do the rendering, even within an iframe, on iOS (where iframes have an amazing quirk of resizing automatically) without messing with scrolling (both vertical velocity and horizontal swipes) and breaking the browser's on-page search (which is extremely annoying); in fact, it is so easy to pull this stuff off on iOS (again: in no small part due to the epic iframe quirk) that it kind of comes off like you just don't care.

pryce 9y ago

> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested. Criticism of AMP certainly includes technical aspects, but most objections I encounter are ethical rather than technical. Did Google explicitly consider ethical considerations when creating and launching AMP? If so, what did this process look like, and where could we find out more? If not, isn't it time we expected ethical review to be part of significant changes in web infrastructure, the same way we would with significant changes in physical infrastructure?

izacus 9y ago
Funny how literaly tens of behavioural trackers on sites that follow you everywhere, abuse holes in browser sandboxes to steal private data and try to install malware did not bring quarter of vitrol here on HN. More, bunch of people defended that as "we need to make profit". Now that someone got rid of that it's suddenly an "ethical issue"?!
- 0x8BADF00D 9y ago
  It's an ethical issue because I can easily block ads and malware. I cannot opt out of AMP if I use Google as my primary search engine. It's about market power.
- pryce 9y ago
  We have somewhat different expectations of Google than malware sites, because we expect it to act as a good net citizen, and a thoughtful custodian of its enormous power to shape the future of our culture. The risk critics are concerned about here is a future where the internet no longer "belongs" to the people on it anymore, and despite the malicious nature of the abuses you named, they hardly represented that class of threat.

Aaargh20318 9y ago

> We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. So basically the argument boils down to "because I have shit internet, everyone else should suffer too".