15 ms·

Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not ju

Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster. Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts.

makmanalp 8y ago
> Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  AMP can be served by anybody and browsers will preload likely destinations regardless of AMP or not.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  > Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question. On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it. That's often how these things go, anyway.
macandcheese 8y ago
Google creates an environment where you "need to use AMP" because they prioritize search results for properties that have AMP varietals - placing them in the "carousel" on top of search results. You can build a very performant static site, with terrific SEO and social share meta tags, etc. - but without AMP - and still be positioned below another property who's "regular" site is slow and full of cruft but has an AMP varietal.
- nojvek 8y ago
  In a way, Google IS the internet. AMP prioritized searches moves them to even more centralized internet where they control everything, host everything and can dump your site at their whims.
- bvc35 8y ago
  If this isn't a sign that Google is a monopoly, I don't know what is.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrep 8y ago
    No, Google is the dominate search engine which is part of an oligopoly which while still not as economically efficient as a perfectly competitive market, they have nowhere near the power of a monopoly. If Google replaced all of their search results with ads, people would easily switch to bing as bing isn't that much worse. Facebook on the other hand definitely is "pretty much" a monopoly (but not completely) for certain subsets of the social media market due to network effects which is why they shovel ads down your throat on their platform and they are making tons of money.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Google has an unseen network effect... Their search results are good because they do machine learning on data from all their other users. A lesser-used search engine has less data, so even if they have smarter people and a better algorithm, the search results will probably be inferior.
      - mrep 8y ago
        That is fair. However, I still argue that it is not nearly as strong as it is easy for me to switch from google search to bing as most of my search results won't really change as they are basic searches but it is incredibly painful to switch social media networks as you have to rebuild your individual content and network connections for the new sight.
nate 8y ago
Right. Absolutely. People should just follow some of these restrictions to get speed without AMP. I went down this AMP path though because of yes the Icon. Google was testing the Icon in Paid Ads I had read, and wanted to see if that could also improve our Click Through Rates. I also wanted to see if officially being AMP could improve things like our Quality Score in our ads, which would reduce our click cost, etc. So yeah, just me trying to get blessed by G so everything else improves from G for us :)
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > People should just follow some of these restrictions to get speed without AMP It's easier for a dev at a newspaper to say "sorry marketing, Google AMP doesn't allow your javascript" than to actually argue with marketing.
  - bdhess 8y ago
    Unless the dev has the authority to make the decision, what he should really do is explain the tradeoff: “Hey marketing, I know you want this feature, but it’s gonna cause us to drop down in Google results. Is it still worth it?”
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ravenstine 8y ago
      Yeah, good luck using reason with these people. They'll just stare at you and say something along the lines of "But it's Google and they say so." Tell them that it won't support all their various analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and A/B testing scripts that fill up their charts with vanity metrics they use to impress stakeholders.
    - smacktoward 8y ago
      Never underestimate the willingness of salespeople to trade potential revenue booked tomorrow for real revenue they can book today.
saagarjha 8y ago
They have a little carousel at the top of the search results containing only AMP pages, right?
- nate 8y ago
  Ah, yeah, that's true too. Wasn't critical for us on this landing page stuff. But yes, that's another reason blogs and news sites are AMPing their stuff.
rectang 8y ago
I had a thought the other day: Is there a mobile browser that tracks bandwidth used, and can tell me how much money I'm spending on bandwidth per domain? I'd like to know which sites are parsimonious about page size. Then I'll limit my mobile browsing to those and ditch the ones that don't care.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Brave shows how many ads and trackers it has blocked, as well as a number that's labeled Time Saved. How that is calculated I haven't the foggiest, but it must be related to download size.
  - rusbus 8y ago
    Probably `Content-Length` of requests they didn't serve divided by your average download speed?
  - echelon 8y ago
    Brave shows this on the "new tab" page. I was surprised with how much these numbers added up over time, though I do suppose they are reasonable estimations.
  - was_boring 8y ago
    As far as I'm aware, Brave is open source and this appears to be the time saved calculation on Android. https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/blob/b4d565f0748c0b3ea189c71d76222144d2823507/components/download/internal/common/download_stats.cc#L916 https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/blob/b4d565f07...
    - splonk 8y ago
      Interesting. I (like others here, apparently) assumed that the time saved number was based on various tracking scripts that weren't downloaded, but if this is the relevant code, looks like it's just tracking parallel requests.
Ajedi32 8y ago
There are other optimizations AMP implements that aren't currently possible with regular web pages, notably [their ability to be automatically preloaded by the browser without compromising the user's privacy][1]. Once [cross-origin server push][2] becomes standardized, regular webpages will be able to take advantage of similar functionality. [1]: https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da2456 https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245... [2]: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses.html#rfc.section.5.2 https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
- cphoover 8y ago
  pre-fetching links is not a new optimization technique. And it doesn't require any new technologies to implement.
  - oconnor663 8y ago
    "Without compromising the user's privacy" is the key detail there.
  - acdha 8y ago
    It's true that this exists but there are complications – for example, rel=prefetch has no JavaScript API so you either need to put rel=prefetch for all of the top results or do something hacky to trigger it for only the link the user hovered the mouse over before clicking, etc. There are also privacy concerns – e.g. the remote server could set a cookie in a response without you ever visiting that site but if you disable cookies by default users will have to refetch the resource anyway if there's any session state involved in page generation. You also have issues like companies wanting to distinguish between traffic from actual page views and the prefetch mechanism. That's not to say that the answer is AMP — e.g. since it puts so much render-blocking JavaScript into the critical path prefetching is often just canceling out that cost – and it's sad that the marketing push has made the discussion of alternative performance improvements unnecessarily contentious.
linkmotif 8y ago
I always avoid AMP pages but we are a tiny minority. Most people I know like AMP pages because they are fast.
manigandham 8y ago
AMP is just a fork of HTML, creating more pressure and work for publishers to implement. The reason why they do it is because of better search page placement in Google. It's unfair and wasteful, since site speed can easily be measured by the most advanced search engine that already has tools and reports doing exactly that.
- aceon48 8y ago
  AMP is not a search ranking signal. Non-AMP pages will end up in the carousel in 2019... if sites can easily be sped up, why do 80% of websites still suck so much and are slow? AMP won't be for specialized dev teams, but it helps plenty of average websites.
headcanon 8y ago
Sometimes its not always economical, especially if you need your engineers to focus elsewhere (like the actual product as opposed to the marketing site), or if you have a large organization and it is difficult to lock down website discipline. Should sites be engineered to be efficient? yes. Is everything that should happen actually realistic to achieve? Not exactly.
endorphone 8y ago
HN is utterly incapable of discussing AMP honestly or coherently, so you're hardly going to get many reality-based replies. AMP is offered as a promise to the user, not the publisher. When I see AMP it guarantees that the site has minimally invasive JavaScript (and the scourge of nonsense that comes with many sites now), will load quickly, etc. The site cannot suddenly bait and switch and start mining bitcoin or spamming pop-overs because it has been technically restricted from doing so. So yes, sites can be every bit as fast as AMP. And industrial manufacturers can be every bit as clean as required by regulators if they had no regulation. But they aren't, and they don't. We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
- consumer451 8y ago
  I like AMPages when they are served by the content creator, but I hate AMPages when they are served on Google's CDN. Honest question: would the author of the linked article have experienced the same issues if the users had actually visited his own site's AMPages?
  - nate 8y ago
    Author here. No, not at all. Well not the first two problems. The extra chrome is just when google is hosting it, and the blank pages only occurred in testing from the CDN.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  > HTML Lite Couldn't agree more with this. People approximate it with e.g. noscript, it would be awesome to have a standard which describes a minimal HTML Lite spec though. Edit: It would be awesome as another option in the link context menu: open in new tab, open in incognito tab, open in lite tab
  - hammock 8y ago
    Maybe roll back to an old browser?
berns 8y ago
No, it's not only about size and js restrictions. Here is a summary of the strategies employed (edited from [0]). - Execute all AMP JavaScript asynchronously - Size all resources statically - AMP uncouples document layout from resource layout. Only one HTTP request is needed to layout the entire doc. - All CSS must be inline and size-bound - Minimize style recalculations - Only run GPU-accelerated animations - Prioritize resource loading - The new preconnect API is used heavily - When AMP documents get prerendered for instant loading, only resources above the fold are actually downloaded. Resources that might use a lot of CPU (like third-party iframes) do not get downloaded. [0]: https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/
- Vinnl 8y ago
  OP's point was that those are all techniques that you don't need AMP to implement. So their question is: if those are the reason for you to use AMP, why use AMP and not just implement them directly?
  - berns 8y ago
    Why not use AMP? If you don't use the special caches, it's just another library.
- technion 8y ago
  I really question this "inline all CSS". Consider: - 1K of HTML with 40K of CSS in a file with a long term cache. Clicking a different page on the site downloads another 1K of HTML. - A 41K file with everything inlined. Clicking a link downloads another 41K.
  - megaremote 8y ago
    Ok, but that does not sound like a real world example.
    - technion 8y ago
      Why not? The Medium link we're all looking at right now has a 43KB CSS stylesheet. It's sent with browser headers giving it a long cache. In the AMP world, this whole stylesheet would end up inlined, and you would download it again the next time someone posted a Medium link on HN.
pasta 8y ago
The only thing that made people use AMP is that there were rumours that Google would rank AMP sites heigher. I think that's the only reason.
- briankelly 8y ago
  Rumors? Just about every Google search I make brings back a carousel with exclusively AMP near or at the top. It's absolutely prioritized.
PunchTornado 8y ago
I mostly click on AMP links if I'm on mobile. I know those load fast, so if I see one then that's what I hit.
notatoad 8y ago
AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages. But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight. It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.
- saudioger 8y ago
  This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us profitable." Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a little power to say "no we can't do that."
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Can you simply replace AMP with GDPR?
    - PaulHoule 8y ago
      Nah, blame the EU for all of those pop-over ads that you see on sites like Tedium. You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU, thus everybody learned how to make pop-overs and pop-overs were legitimized because they aren't just advertising but something perceived to be required by regulation.
NathanCH 8y ago
Regarding your recommend point, I think Occam's razor applies. Seems unlikely there is an unconscious collective purposely avoiding AMP links. It's much more likely that the changes done to a website to satisfy AMP affected the conversion rate.
Illniyar 8y ago
Actually the main performance gains is by google search preloading everything (basically putting it in an iFrame before you click on it). Which practically means that pages load instantly. https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-really/ https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r...
- tfb 8y ago
  Google could easily adjust their ranking algorithm to better reward non-AMP pages (which they've obviously already crawled) which they know are 1) below say 75 KB and 2) contain a limited number of resources to fetch. But instead of doing that, they choose to attempt to strongarm everyone into using AMP.
  - eythian 8y ago
    In the article they say they're planning on doing exactly that.
    - tfb 8y ago
      Hopefully they actually follow through on that.
snappieT 8y ago
Because nothing will be faster than the Google-cached copy of your page, and that’s only served up if it meets the AMP spec.
frogpelt 8y ago
You're not the only one. I will load AMP pages and then tap through to the source page just to make sure I'm not letting Google control the experience.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
The author was wrong. AMP is a way to prerender web pages in a way that plays nice with analytics. The rest makes the preload fast, but the user doesn't experience it because when they navigate to the page, it is already rendered.
RestlessMind 8y ago
> ... why do you need to use AMP? Because you need to convince business folks about stripping down bloat from your webpages. And doing that by citing sticks and carrots from Big-G is much easier than doing it on your own. So we can attribute this to: laziness of developers (who cannot make arguments to reduce bloat), boneheadedness of business folks (who cannot quickly understand why bloat is bad), tragedy of commons (my competitors are gaining valuable traffic by having their articles in special Google carousel at the top of search results, I am missing out so I must do AMP) etc.
- s17n 8y ago
  There's no laziness or boneheadedness involved. Without the AMP carousel, making a fast website is a bad business decision. With the carousel, it's a good one. The usability of your site just doesn't really matter if your business is to get traffic from Google and monetize it, which is what we are talking about here.
sfoblowsjose 8y ago
Stick to duck duck go and opera
bluejay2387 8y ago
I don't avoid them out of principle, but since JavaScript is turned off by default in my browser none of them work for me to begin with. I can't whitelist AMP pages like I can non-amp pages I browse. AMP pages over-all are a terrible experience.
- tagawa 8y ago
  Sadly ironic that the format doesn’t allow JavaScript to ensure pages are lightweight and fast-loading, and yet disabling JS stops them from displaying.
megaremote 8y ago
If it was up to developers, it would be. It is not up to devs.
rident 8y ago
One lesser mentioned feature of AMP is when they are found through Google search, they are prefetched. So in addition to being size restricted, they are probably already partially if not completely downloaded in the background before the link is clicked. Giving them an extra advantage over other search results. You can implement this feature yourself too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefetching_FAQ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
jbarham 8y ago
> If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Maciej Cegłowski (aka idlewords) recommends exactly this is in his (2015!) talk "The Website Obesity Crisis": http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm His specific comments about AMP: "AMP is a special subset of HTML designed to be fast on mobile devices. Why not just serve regular HTML without stuffing it full of useless crap? The question is left unanswered."
nkkollaw 8y ago
It looks like the only reason to use AMP is to bypass ad blockers and sell more advertising, and this is also the only reason why Google developed it. Personally, I think it's stupid from content creators, because if I visit the website I might read more articles, share, or sign up to the newsletter, and that doesn't happen with all AMP implementations I've seen.
zebraflask 8y ago
Sorry if this distracts from the topic, but one of the biggest reasons I, and a few people I know, don't like AMP is that - this will sound trivial - but they're a real annoyance when you want to cut and paste a link into an email or a text message when you're on a phone. I'm not going to screw around with finding a share button or what have you on a mobile site, nobody knows what JS is behind those. So, lack of UX with the links.
- casefields 8y ago
  It drives me bonkers and makes me irrationally angry.
microdrum 8y ago
I never click on AMP links. Google ≠ the internet.
takeda 8y ago
TBH until yesterday when I saw the article I did not even notice the lightning bolt, my brain was automatically filtering it, and now that I know it similarly to you I probably will start skipping those links (similarly what I do with responses tagged as "Ad"). The reason for it is the same why I use uMatrix, I don't want to provide Google with more information about me. So unless Google actually adjusts the ranking it is useless to get AMP. I wish though that many web sites would chill down with including so much of JS on their pages.
acrossthepond10 8y ago
Is it possible for Google to factor in page load speeds into their search algorithm? Hopefully in a way that actually encourages publishers to optimise for performance and not focus on fooling googles webcrawlers

makmanalp 8y ago

> Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.

ebikelaw 8y ago
AMP can be served by anybody and browsers will preload likely destinations regardless of AMP or not.
52-6F-62 8y ago
> Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question. On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it. That's often how these things go, anyway.

macandcheese 8y ago

Google creates an environment where you "need to use AMP" because they prioritize search results for properties that have AMP varietals - placing them in the "carousel" on top of search results. You can build a very performant static site, with terrific SEO and social share meta tags, etc. - but without AMP - and still be positioned below another property who's "regular" site is slow and full of cruft but has an AMP varietal.

nojvek 8y ago
In a way, Google IS the internet. AMP prioritized searches moves them to even more centralized internet where they control everything, host everything and can dump your site at their whims.
bvc35 8y ago
If this isn't a sign that Google is a monopoly, I don't know what is.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mrep 8y ago
  No, Google is the dominate search engine which is part of an oligopoly which while still not as economically efficient as a perfectly competitive market, they have nowhere near the power of a monopoly. If Google replaced all of their search results with ads, people would easily switch to bing as bing isn't that much worse. Facebook on the other hand definitely is "pretty much" a monopoly (but not completely) for certain subsets of the social media market due to network effects which is why they shovel ads down your throat on their platform and they are making tons of money.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Google has an unseen network effect... Their search results are good because they do machine learning on data from all their other users. A lesser-used search engine has less data, so even if they have smarter people and a better algorithm, the search results will probably be inferior.
    - mrep 8y ago
      That is fair. However, I still argue that it is not nearly as strong as it is easy for me to switch from google search to bing as most of my search results won't really change as they are basic searches but it is incredibly painful to switch social media networks as you have to rebuild your individual content and network connections for the new sight.

nate 8y ago

Right. Absolutely. People should just follow some of these restrictions to get speed without AMP. I went down this AMP path though because of yes the Icon. Google was testing the Icon in Paid Ads I had read, and wanted to see if that could also improve our Click Through Rates. I also wanted to see if officially being AMP could improve things like our Quality Score in our ads, which would reduce our click cost, etc. So yeah, just me trying to get blessed by G so everything else improves from G for us :)

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> People should just follow some of these restrictions to get speed without AMP It's easier for a dev at a newspaper to say "sorry marketing, Google AMP doesn't allow your javascript" than to actually argue with marketing.
- bdhess 8y ago
  Unless the dev has the authority to make the decision, what he should really do is explain the tradeoff: “Hey marketing, I know you want this feature, but it’s gonna cause us to drop down in Google results. Is it still worth it?”
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    Yeah, good luck using reason with these people. They'll just stare at you and say something along the lines of "But it's Google and they say so." Tell them that it won't support all their various analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and A/B testing scripts that fill up their charts with vanity metrics they use to impress stakeholders.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    Never underestimate the willingness of salespeople to trade potential revenue booked tomorrow for real revenue they can book today.

saagarjha 8y ago

They have a little carousel at the top of the search results containing only AMP pages, right?

nate 8y ago
Ah, yeah, that's true too. Wasn't critical for us on this landing page stuff. But yes, that's another reason blogs and news sites are AMPing their stuff.

rectang 8y ago

I had a thought the other day: Is there a mobile browser that tracks bandwidth used, and can tell me how much money I'm spending on bandwidth per domain? I'd like to know which sites are parsimonious about page size. Then I'll limit my mobile browsing to those and ditch the ones that don't care.

megaman22 8y ago
Brave shows how many ads and trackers it has blocked, as well as a number that's labeled Time Saved. How that is calculated I haven't the foggiest, but it must be related to download size.
- rusbus 8y ago
  Probably `Content-Length` of requests they didn't serve divided by your average download speed?
- echelon 8y ago
  Brave shows this on the "new tab" page. I was surprised with how much these numbers added up over time, though I do suppose they are reasonable estimations.
- was_boring 8y ago
  As far as I'm aware, Brave is open source and this appears to be the time saved calculation on Android. https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/blob/b4d565f0748c0b3ea189c71d76222144d2823507/components/download/internal/common/download_stats.cc#L916 https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/blob/b4d565f07...
  - splonk 8y ago
    Interesting. I (like others here, apparently) assumed that the time saved number was based on various tracking scripts that weren't downloaded, but if this is the relevant code, looks like it's just tracking parallel requests.

Ajedi32 8y ago

There are other optimizations AMP implements that aren't currently possible with regular web pages, notably [their ability to be automatically preloaded by the browser without compromising the user's privacy][1]. Once [cross-origin server push][2] becomes standardized, regular webpages will be able to take advantage of similar functionality. [1]: https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da2456 https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245... [2]: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses.html#rfc.section.5.2 https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...

cphoover 8y ago
pre-fetching links is not a new optimization technique. And it doesn't require any new technologies to implement.
- oconnor663 8y ago
  "Without compromising the user's privacy" is the key detail there.
- acdha 8y ago
  It's true that this exists but there are complications – for example, rel=prefetch has no JavaScript API so you either need to put rel=prefetch for all of the top results or do something hacky to trigger it for only the link the user hovered the mouse over before clicking, etc. There are also privacy concerns – e.g. the remote server could set a cookie in a response without you ever visiting that site but if you disable cookies by default users will have to refetch the resource anyway if there's any session state involved in page generation. You also have issues like companies wanting to distinguish between traffic from actual page views and the prefetch mechanism. That's not to say that the answer is AMP — e.g. since it puts so much render-blocking JavaScript into the critical path prefetching is often just canceling out that cost – and it's sad that the marketing push has made the discussion of alternative performance improvements unnecessarily contentious.

linkmotif 8y ago

I always avoid AMP pages but we are a tiny minority. Most people I know like AMP pages because they are fast.

manigandham 8y ago

AMP is just a fork of HTML, creating more pressure and work for publishers to implement. The reason why they do it is because of better search page placement in Google. It's unfair and wasteful, since site speed can easily be measured by the most advanced search engine that already has tools and reports doing exactly that.

aceon48 8y ago
AMP is not a search ranking signal. Non-AMP pages will end up in the carousel in 2019... if sites can easily be sped up, why do 80% of websites still suck so much and are slow? AMP won't be for specialized dev teams, but it helps plenty of average websites.

headcanon 8y ago

Sometimes its not always economical, especially if you need your engineers to focus elsewhere (like the actual product as opposed to the marketing site), or if you have a large organization and it is difficult to lock down website discipline. Should sites be engineered to be efficient? yes. Is everything that should happen actually realistic to achieve? Not exactly.

endorphone 8y ago

HN is utterly incapable of discussing AMP honestly or coherently, so you're hardly going to get many reality-based replies. AMP is offered as a promise to the user, not the publisher. When I see AMP it guarantees that the site has minimally invasive JavaScript (and the scourge of nonsense that comes with many sites now), will load quickly, etc. The site cannot suddenly bait and switch and start mining bitcoin or spamming pop-overs because it has been technically restricted from doing so. So yes, sites can be every bit as fast as AMP. And industrial manufacturers can be every bit as clean as required by regulators if they had no regulation. But they aren't, and they don't. We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.

consumer451 8y ago
I like AMPages when they are served by the content creator, but I hate AMPages when they are served on Google's CDN. Honest question: would the author of the linked article have experienced the same issues if the users had actually visited his own site's AMPages?
- nate 8y ago
  Author here. No, not at all. Well not the first two problems. The extra chrome is just when google is hosting it, and the blank pages only occurred in testing from the CDN.
Godel_unicode 8y ago
> HTML Lite Couldn't agree more with this. People approximate it with e.g. noscript, it would be awesome to have a standard which describes a minimal HTML Lite spec though. Edit: It would be awesome as another option in the link context menu: open in new tab, open in incognito tab, open in lite tab
- hammock 8y ago
  Maybe roll back to an old browser?

berns 8y ago

No, it's not only about size and js restrictions. Here is a summary of the strategies employed (edited from [0]). - Execute all AMP JavaScript asynchronously - Size all resources statically - AMP uncouples document layout from resource layout. Only one HTTP request is needed to layout the entire doc. - All CSS must be inline and size-bound - Minimize style recalculations - Only run GPU-accelerated animations - Prioritize resource loading - The new preconnect API is used heavily - When AMP documents get prerendered for instant loading, only resources above the fold are actually downloaded. Resources that might use a lot of CPU (like third-party iframes) do not get downloaded. [0]: https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/

Vinnl 8y ago
OP's point was that those are all techniques that you don't need AMP to implement. So their question is: if those are the reason for you to use AMP, why use AMP and not just implement them directly?
- berns 8y ago
  Why not use AMP? If you don't use the special caches, it's just another library.
technion 8y ago
I really question this "inline all CSS". Consider: - 1K of HTML with 40K of CSS in a file with a long term cache. Clicking a different page on the site downloads another 1K of HTML. - A 41K file with everything inlined. Clicking a link downloads another 41K.
- megaremote 8y ago
  Ok, but that does not sound like a real world example.
  - technion 8y ago
    Why not? The Medium link we're all looking at right now has a 43KB CSS stylesheet. It's sent with browser headers giving it a long cache. In the AMP world, this whole stylesheet would end up inlined, and you would download it again the next time someone posted a Medium link on HN.

pasta 8y ago

The only thing that made people use AMP is that there were rumours that Google would rank AMP sites heigher. I think that's the only reason.

briankelly 8y ago
Rumors? Just about every Google search I make brings back a carousel with exclusively AMP near or at the top. It's absolutely prioritized.

PunchTornado 8y ago

I mostly click on AMP links if I'm on mobile. I know those load fast, so if I see one then that's what I hit.

notatoad 8y ago

AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages. But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight. It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.

saudioger 8y ago
This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us profitable." Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a little power to say "no we can't do that."
- Angostura 8y ago
  Can you simply replace AMP with GDPR?
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    Nah, blame the EU for all of those pop-over ads that you see on sites like Tedium. You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU, thus everybody learned how to make pop-overs and pop-overs were legitimized because they aren't just advertising but something perceived to be required by regulation.

NathanCH 8y ago

Regarding your recommend point, I think Occam's razor applies. Seems unlikely there is an unconscious collective purposely avoiding AMP links. It's much more likely that the changes done to a website to satisfy AMP affected the conversion rate.

Illniyar 8y ago

Actually the main performance gains is by google search preloading everything (basically putting it in an iFrame before you click on it). Which practically means that pages load instantly. https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-really/ https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r...

tfb 8y ago
Google could easily adjust their ranking algorithm to better reward non-AMP pages (which they've obviously already crawled) which they know are 1) below say 75 KB and 2) contain a limited number of resources to fetch. But instead of doing that, they choose to attempt to strongarm everyone into using AMP.
- eythian 8y ago
  In the article they say they're planning on doing exactly that.
  - tfb 8y ago
    Hopefully they actually follow through on that.

snappieT 8y ago

Because nothing will be faster than the Google-cached copy of your page, and that’s only served up if it meets the AMP spec.

frogpelt 8y ago

You're not the only one. I will load AMP pages and then tap through to the source page just to make sure I'm not letting Google control the experience.

lern_too_spel 8y ago

The author was wrong. AMP is a way to prerender web pages in a way that plays nice with analytics. The rest makes the preload fast, but the user doesn't experience it because when they navigate to the page, it is already rendered.

RestlessMind 8y ago

> ... why do you need to use AMP? Because you need to convince business folks about stripping down bloat from your webpages. And doing that by citing sticks and carrots from Big-G is much easier than doing it on your own. So we can attribute this to: laziness of developers (who cannot make arguments to reduce bloat), boneheadedness of business folks (who cannot quickly understand why bloat is bad), tragedy of commons (my competitors are gaining valuable traffic by having their articles in special Google carousel at the top of search results, I am missing out so I must do AMP) etc.

s17n 8y ago
There's no laziness or boneheadedness involved. Without the AMP carousel, making a fast website is a bad business decision. With the carousel, it's a good one. The usability of your site just doesn't really matter if your business is to get traffic from Google and monetize it, which is what we are talking about here.

sfoblowsjose 8y ago

Stick to duck duck go and opera

bluejay2387 8y ago

I don't avoid them out of principle, but since JavaScript is turned off by default in my browser none of them work for me to begin with. I can't whitelist AMP pages like I can non-amp pages I browse. AMP pages over-all are a terrible experience.

tagawa 8y ago
Sadly ironic that the format doesn’t allow JavaScript to ensure pages are lightweight and fast-loading, and yet disabling JS stops them from displaying.

megaremote 8y ago

If it was up to developers, it would be. It is not up to devs.

rident 8y ago

One lesser mentioned feature of AMP is when they are found through Google search, they are prefetched. So in addition to being size restricted, they are probably already partially if not completely downloaded in the background before the link is clicked. Giving them an extra advantage over other search results. You can implement this feature yourself too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefetching_FAQ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...

jbarham 8y ago

> If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Maciej Cegłowski (aka idlewords) recommends exactly this is in his (2015!) talk "The Website Obesity Crisis": http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm His specific comments about AMP: "AMP is a special subset of HTML designed to be fast on mobile devices. Why not just serve regular HTML without stuffing it full of useless crap? The question is left unanswered."

nkkollaw 8y ago

It looks like the only reason to use AMP is to bypass ad blockers and sell more advertising, and this is also the only reason why Google developed it. Personally, I think it's stupid from content creators, because if I visit the website I might read more articles, share, or sign up to the newsletter, and that doesn't happen with all AMP implementations I've seen.

zebraflask 8y ago

Sorry if this distracts from the topic, but one of the biggest reasons I, and a few people I know, don't like AMP is that - this will sound trivial - but they're a real annoyance when you want to cut and paste a link into an email or a text message when you're on a phone. I'm not going to screw around with finding a share button or what have you on a mobile site, nobody knows what JS is behind those. So, lack of UX with the links.

casefields 8y ago
It drives me bonkers and makes me irrationally angry.

microdrum 8y ago

I never click on AMP links. Google ≠ the internet.

takeda 8y ago

TBH until yesterday when I saw the article I did not even notice the lightning bolt, my brain was automatically filtering it, and now that I know it similarly to you I probably will start skipping those links (similarly what I do with responses tagged as "Ad"). The reason for it is the same why I use uMatrix, I don't want to provide Google with more information about me. So unless Google actually adjusts the ranking it is useless to get AMP. I wish though that many web sites would chill down with including so much of JS on their pages.

acrossthepond10 8y ago

Is it possible for Google to factor in page load speeds into their search algorithm? Hopefully in a way that actually encourages publishers to optimise for performance and not focus on fooling googles webcrawlers