6 ms·

I don't see the point of AMP. Why not just give certain sites a little icon/preference if they're faster than XXXms? Glad to see this letter says as much.

by tabeth 9y ago

shirian 9y ago
Well, if one were to buy into the hypothesis that AMP is a way for Google to monopolize content, that would be the reason. At least in search results provided by Google's search.
Klathmon 9y ago
Because they did that, for years, and next to nobody changed anything. Fast websites stayed fast, and slow websites stayed slow. They also gave out tons of free "speed test" tools to make it easy for developers to test their speed, and improve it. They even made apache and nginx plugins that would auto-optimize assets as it served them! And still basically nobody used them. Plus it's not just about "faster than XXXms". What is that time measured to? Time to text on the screen? Can they game it by lazy-loading images, then videos, then ads, then 6mb of other javascript and social networking stuff and a comment system and...? You could try a "size limit", but then you penalize asset heavy sites (like high-resolution image sharing sites, or video sites). So their solution was to make a very restrictive system where you are forced to do things "the right way" (for at least one definition of "right"), and to pump that up in the search results. Plugins were made for common blogging and news platforms, and now a portion of the web loads significantly faster for many, and I think that's a win. It's not perfect, but it's at least the first thing that I've seen google try in this area that is actually working. Obviously there is benefit to Google as a company in that now results that are served through their AMP system are faster than those of some of their competitors, and AMP gives them a nice easy way to pull some structured information from an article for things like the carousel or other non-search offerings, but I genuinely don't believe that was the main motivator, seeing as Google has years of examples of failed attempts to "fix" this problem (though maybe I'm just not cynical enough!).
- tabeth 9y ago
  Why does anyone have to change anything? If a site decides to allocate resources towards content vs. speed is that so bad?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pas 9y ago
    Google wants you to search more, visit more pages, so it can show more ads. So it needs a faster Web.
    - BRAlNlAC 9y ago
      yeah. this is why i abandonded Google a couple years ago. it became clear to me that they werent trying to provide me with search results that satisfied my curiosity, everything was tailored to draw me in and keep me searching. it wont send you to a page that is rich with content, itll send you to one stub article after another. i think its kinda hilarious how there is this fixation with load speeds amongst web devs. most people i know are far more concerned with everything other than the load time.
      - jmulho 9y ago
        Uh, there definitely isn’t any fixation with load speeds amongst web devs. If there were, the web wouldn’t be a complete disaster and there wouldn’t be any need for AMP. Users care about load speeds. Web devs care about getting their sites to work when their core i7 workstations are connected to the corporate intranet, and getting paid.
- untog 9y ago
  But they could do the best of both worlds if they wanted. The launch of AMP was coupled with the "carousel" that appears at the top of search result pages. Only AMP pages are eligible to appear in that carousel. Why not keep the carousel, but prioritise by overall load time?
bsimpson 9y ago
As I understand it, a round-trip request on a mobile network can be very expensive [0]. One of the ways that AMP enables sites to load instantly-upon-click is by starting those requests in the background. (Then, when the user clicks, it's just a matter of bringing the IFRAME into view - no network involved.) Loading a traditional site can have side effects (e.g. reporting a view to an advertiser's analytics). By using the AMP validator, Google Search knows it's safe to preload and prerender an article, without triggering side-effects like analytics. So it's more than just loading faster than some threshold; it needs to be safe to cache and prerender the content. The AMP validator is what asserts these are both safe. (Note, I don't work on AMP and don't represent Google - this is my personal understanding.) [0] Ilya Grigorik's time-to-glass talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4swGfTOSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4swGfTOSM
- tscs37 9y ago
  I have a very low datacap, I don't want a website to preload anything, I'd rather have a slow load.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Preload is treated as a browser hint. Presumably, your browser knows you're on a capped network. https://medium.com/reloading/preload-prefetch-and-priorities-in-chrome-776165961bbf https://medium.com/reloading/preload-prefetch-and-priorities...
    - tscs37 9y ago
      That would be preloading assets, not the preloading of entire AMP sites as the GP describes.
- wmf 9y ago
  Best practices can reduce page load time from ~10s down to ~1s and then preloading can reduce it to maybe ~20ms. Google's "preloading or nothing" attitude and the refusal to discuss tradeoffs between market power and speed really isn't helpful.
bagacrap 9y ago
AMP pre-loads content, and no third party site can do that, so it's probably impossible to be as fast as AMP. The narrative of wanting to monopolize user traffic doesn't make much sense in light of the recent announcement around URLs.
- ninkendo 9y ago
  downvoters: this is 100% true. AMP has some nice standards on how to make a fast page but at the end of the day, google's re-hosting your page in a place where it can fetch in advance while obeying the same-origin policy, and clicking a result is the moral equivalent of unsetting a "display: hidden" attribute on the page. AMP only works today because it's re-hosted inside the origin (google.com), so much that in order to fix this in the future, they'll have to rush out a new web standard and implement it in chrome (and hope other browsers do the same:) https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-pages/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- shostack 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you think it doesn't make much sense. Google can do things that benefit multiple parties including themselves. I think a lot of this is in reaction to FB's Instant Articles and wanting to gain further leverage over publishers. If you can commoditize publishers' content and control the format, and you supply the users and the monetization via ads, you can make the publishers do whatever you want because the alternative is for them to lose money, which they can't afford to do. In many ways, this is a very defensive play by Google. It also happens to provide a better user experience in some ways, which is awesome, and also helps further Google's goals of controlling ad formats and more importantly the data that is collected on publisher sites that lets them monetize their data in ways they may not be able to with AMP pages.
notatoad 9y ago
it's not just about speed, it's about quality as well. AMP has more restrictions than just that the site is fast: amp pages have to have all the image sizes defined and the content loaded in the initial load - no fast page loads followed by spinners or lazy-loaded content, or page blocks that jump around as loads. It's a better user experience all around, not just a faster page.

I don't see the point of AMP. Why not just give certain sites a little icon/preference if they're faster than XXXms? Glad to see this letter says as much.

by tabeth 9y ago

I don't see the point of AMP. Why not just give certain sites a little icon/preference if they're faster than XXXms? Glad to see this letter says as much.

shirian 9y ago

Well, if one were to buy into the hypothesis that AMP is a way for Google to monopolize content, that would be the reason. At least in search results provided by Google's search.

Klathmon 9y ago

Because they did that, for years, and next to nobody changed anything. Fast websites stayed fast, and slow websites stayed slow. They also gave out tons of free "speed test" tools to make it easy for developers to test their speed, and improve it. They even made apache and nginx plugins that would auto-optimize assets as it served them! And still basically nobody used them. Plus it's not just about "faster than XXXms". What is that time measured to? Time to text on the screen? Can they game it by lazy-loading images, then videos, then ads, then 6mb of other javascript and social networking stuff and a comment system and...? You could try a "size limit", but then you penalize asset heavy sites (like high-resolution image sharing sites, or video sites). So their solution was to make a very restrictive system where you are forced to do things "the right way" (for at least one definition of "right"), and to pump that up in the search results. Plugins were made for common blogging and news platforms, and now a portion of the web loads significantly faster for many, and I think that's a win. It's not perfect, but it's at least the first thing that I've seen google try in this area that is actually working. Obviously there is benefit to Google as a company in that now results that are served through their AMP system are faster than those of some of their competitors, and AMP gives them a nice easy way to pull some structured information from an article for things like the carousel or other non-search offerings, but I genuinely don't believe that was the main motivator, seeing as Google has years of examples of failed attempts to "fix" this problem (though maybe I'm just not cynical enough!).

tabeth 9y ago
Why does anyone have to change anything? If a site decides to allocate resources towards content vs. speed is that so bad?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pas 9y ago
  Google wants you to search more, visit more pages, so it can show more ads. So it needs a faster Web.
  - BRAlNlAC 9y ago
    yeah. this is why i abandonded Google a couple years ago. it became clear to me that they werent trying to provide me with search results that satisfied my curiosity, everything was tailored to draw me in and keep me searching. it wont send you to a page that is rich with content, itll send you to one stub article after another. i think its kinda hilarious how there is this fixation with load speeds amongst web devs. most people i know are far more concerned with everything other than the load time.
    - jmulho 9y ago
      Uh, there definitely isn’t any fixation with load speeds amongst web devs. If there were, the web wouldn’t be a complete disaster and there wouldn’t be any need for AMP. Users care about load speeds. Web devs care about getting their sites to work when their core i7 workstations are connected to the corporate intranet, and getting paid.
untog 9y ago
But they could do the best of both worlds if they wanted. The launch of AMP was coupled with the "carousel" that appears at the top of search result pages. Only AMP pages are eligible to appear in that carousel. Why not keep the carousel, but prioritise by overall load time?

bsimpson 9y ago

As I understand it, a round-trip request on a mobile network can be very expensive [0]. One of the ways that AMP enables sites to load instantly-upon-click is by starting those requests in the background. (Then, when the user clicks, it's just a matter of bringing the IFRAME into view - no network involved.) Loading a traditional site can have side effects (e.g. reporting a view to an advertiser's analytics). By using the AMP validator, Google Search knows it's safe to preload and prerender an article, without triggering side-effects like analytics. So it's more than just loading faster than some threshold; it needs to be safe to cache and prerender the content. The AMP validator is what asserts these are both safe. (Note, I don't work on AMP and don't represent Google - this is my personal understanding.) [0] Ilya Grigorik's time-to-glass talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4swGfTOSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4swGfTOSM

tscs37 9y ago
I have a very low datacap, I don't want a website to preload anything, I'd rather have a slow load.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Preload is treated as a browser hint. Presumably, your browser knows you're on a capped network. https://medium.com/reloading/preload-prefetch-and-priorities-in-chrome-776165961bbf https://medium.com/reloading/preload-prefetch-and-priorities...
  - tscs37 9y ago
    That would be preloading assets, not the preloading of entire AMP sites as the GP describes.
wmf 9y ago
Best practices can reduce page load time from ~10s down to ~1s and then preloading can reduce it to maybe ~20ms. Google's "preloading or nothing" attitude and the refusal to discuss tradeoffs between market power and speed really isn't helpful.

bagacrap 9y ago

AMP pre-loads content, and no third party site can do that, so it's probably impossible to be as fast as AMP. The narrative of wanting to monopolize user traffic doesn't make much sense in light of the recent announcement around URLs.

ninkendo 9y ago
downvoters: this is 100% true. AMP has some nice standards on how to make a fast page but at the end of the day, google's re-hosting your page in a place where it can fetch in advance while obeying the same-origin policy, and clicking a result is the moral equivalent of unsetting a "display: hidden" attribute on the page. AMP only works today because it's re-hosted inside the origin (google.com), so much that in order to fix this in the future, they'll have to rush out a new web standard and implement it in chrome (and hope other browsers do the same:) https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-pages/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
shostack 9y ago
I'm not sure why you think it doesn't make much sense. Google can do things that benefit multiple parties including themselves. I think a lot of this is in reaction to FB's Instant Articles and wanting to gain further leverage over publishers. If you can commoditize publishers' content and control the format, and you supply the users and the monetization via ads, you can make the publishers do whatever you want because the alternative is for them to lose money, which they can't afford to do. In many ways, this is a very defensive play by Google. It also happens to provide a better user experience in some ways, which is awesome, and also helps further Google's goals of controlling ad formats and more importantly the data that is collected on publisher sites that lets them monetize their data in ways they may not be able to with AMP pages.

notatoad 9y ago

it's not just about speed, it's about quality as well. AMP has more restrictions than just that the site is fast: amp pages have to have all the image sizes defined and the content loaded in the initial load - no fast page loads followed by spinners or lazy-loaded content, or page blocks that jump around as loads. It's a better user experience all around, not just a faster page.