46 ms·

Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages

532 points by seductivebarry 8y ago

devoply 8y ago
There are many things Google wants, for the past decade most people have been going along with those demands. Perhaps it's time for us to tell Google what we want.
- xvector 8y ago
  Not possible. Google has the web in a vice grip. Don't agree with their policies, drop in ranking, no one sees your disagreements.
  - drb91 8y ago
    This is only true for people who rely on google searches to drive traffic.
mikhailt 8y ago
Oh wow, these type of behaviors is why I’m starting to lean onto the idea of splitting these monopolists into their own companies. I wasn’t sure why it made any sense in the other article today from The Verge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264 But now...
- nevir 8y ago
  The headline is also, probably in reality: "A small subset of Google wants...'
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  I would much prefer a market based solution. Searching news on Google is a bad experience. AMP has made it even worse. There’s room in search.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I still miss when Reader was still very popular.
petepete 8y ago
The idea of moving en masse to a technology that's controlled by a single company just doesn't sit right.
- 37 8y ago
  Isn't this what Google is essentially trying to achieve? Email, video streaming, advertising, etc...
  - _louisr_ 8y ago
    Buy a 5$/month Protonmail account and forward your gmail to it, and slowly migrate all of your various email-authenticated services to point to your protonmail account. Plus Protonmail makes it very easy to run email from a domain that you already own, like your portfolio domain.
    - hjek 8y ago
      Are you actually willing to pay for an email provider that don't support SMTP and IMAP?
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        It's baffling that people are willing to pay for another walled garden.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - alanh 8y ago
        IDK about Protomail, but Fastmail of course supports these protocols. Happy customer here, as are more than a handful of HNers. Reply to sibling: Why would anyone call an email provider a walled garden, especially if using your own domain name?!
        8y ago
jacquesm 8y ago
Let's not pretend we're surprised.
xg15 8y ago
I don't like AMP at all and fully agree with all the lock-in concerns - but I didn't find this post particularly convincing. This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone wants to take that privilege away from him. I can't agree with that. Examples: > The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website’s regular version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item, every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery. So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original? > For years Google has been nudging webmasters to create better websites – ‘better’ meaning ‘easier for Google to understand’. Technologies like XML sitemaps and schema.org structured data are strongly supported by Google because they make the search engine’s life easier. Other initiatives like disavow files and rel=nofollow help Google keep its link graph clean and free from egregious spam. All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. In other words, a Google-shaped web. This is a battle Google has been fighting for decades. Sitemaps and structured data were the non-proprietary attempts to structure the web. Those could have made the web more accessible for everyone, not just Google. They are something fundamentally different than AMP. Yet, he condemns them too? Why? He seems to argue that the chaos and messiness of the web infrastructure is itself a quality that should be defended. Why would that be the case?
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  >So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original? Google is using its dominance in search (again) to force sites to offer AMP versions. Like a "reader view", and lacking evidence at the moment, I bet many sites are building AMP versions with faster load times but reduced features to comply. Now Google is saying "Build your entire site according to our spec, or we'll de-rank you on search". That is a very bold move, and one that would be making front-page news if they said it straight-up in a way that Buzzfeed could write about.
Havoc 8y ago
Reminds me of "embrace extend extinguish" except google skipped the "do as you're told part"
newnewpdro 8y ago
If you work for Google, could you please quit.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  i know i'll get just as downvoted, but I agree with this. Googlers: you are bright, talented and don't need to sell out the future of the web to build interesting and worthwhile things. Your paycheck, however large, is not worth what you are taking away from future generations. Do the right thing and quit.
jancsika 8y ago
Someone tell me about amp-iframe. Do those restrictions[1] result in a browsing experience with 1. significantly less resource usage/battery drain? 2. less distraction? 3. less of my user data flying off to who knows where? [1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-iframe https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ifr...
ccvannorman 8y ago
As a user I hate AMP. I find myself on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! It's NOT the canonical link, but a Google Amp link. I wanted to share the post to a desktop. So now I have to find my way out of this AMP hole just to share a website. Personally I could care less about "speed improvements." If the site loads slow I'll juat skip it. Amp existing to help that happen less doesn't really affect me. I probably waste too much time surfing anyway; maybe I WANT to filter slow websites on my own (by ending my search/session).
- type0 8y ago
  > on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! Eh easy now, they will fix that for soon /s https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-replacement-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-replacemen...
millstone 8y ago
AMP is in two parts: the HTML/JS spec, and the Google implementation and cache. Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the project? On my iPhone AMP is frustratingly buggy: rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't disappear on scroll, Reader mode works inconsistently, etc. But these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.
- wmf 8y ago
  The concern is that Google can unilaterally change the spec any way they want, so even if it's fine now it may get worse in the future.
  - karmelapple 8y ago
    I think OP was sort of getting at the idea of AMP becoming a standard owned externally to google. But the likelihood of that happening seems... low.
    - sverhagen 8y ago
      Wouldn't that be an excellent solution for Google to silence the critics? (Excellent for them, not for us.) Donate the whole thing to a non-profit like Apache, who barely have the manpower to do more than host it, then still regain control by having many of the contributors on payroll?
      - cliffordthedog 8y ago
        Probably, but I doubt they even do that. Is google the worst company around when it comes to this sort of almost faux open source?
      - wmf 8y ago
        The real complaints are not about AMP per se but about Google's market power, so it's not clear that Google can do anything to satisfy critics. (Even splitting search into a separate company would still leave that company as a monopoly.)
brosirmandude 8y ago
Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog... As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.
- da02 8y ago
  What does a marketer do on a daily basis? Edit: Removed "Is it different than advertising?"
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    That's a little like asking "What does a blacksmith do? Is it different than making horseshoes?"
    - da02 8y ago
      I know it was a "stupid" question. But, sometimes I do that in the hopes that someone will provide a guide to a better understanding of the topic. Plus, HN is a good place for anecdotal stuff and "war stories" that are hard to find on other parts of the WWW.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - ladzoppelin 8y ago
      Marketing is extremely technical these days, IMO. Learning to work with API's and even learning Python seems like it would really help anyone in most fields.
    - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
      I think it's a fair question. It's not an industry you hear lots about day to day, so the average person has no idea what's involved other than "they make ads". I've worked in large companies with 20+ person Marketing/PR departments and I'm not actually sure what their day to day job entails, and would totally be curious to know more. It's a major part of society these days, whether we love it or hate it. We all know IT has phone support roles, application development, system admins, project managers, etc... but I couldn't really tell you what all the different roles are in marketing.
45ghrthr54 8y ago
The time has already passed to put this giant down. For a business that lost it's capability of innovating at least 10 years ago, even having all of those great brains as their workforce and plentiful money, they try too hard pushing this kind of bullshit into the industry. Stop trying to enforce unnatural and irrational changes just for gaining protagonism on something you DON'T DESERVE and shouldn't even mess about. It's already annoying having to load your analytics present in almost every modern website, despise the fact that most of the world don't even know about the existence of this, neither agreed with(cannot choose to block something you don't even know about). Are you thinking it's overreaction? wait for tomorrow. Keep underestimating what they are doing.
tananaev 8y ago
I believe that Google has good intentions behind pushing AMP. They want websites to load faster. Everyone wants that. I especially hate those bloated news websites. But AMP is a wrong solution for the problem. If Google wants to make web pages faster, it can more heavily penalise slow and heavy pages in search. I used to host my website using WordPress with a lot of plugins. It was incredibly slow and unreliable. Eventually I decided to replace it with my own custom solution developed from scratch. We had blog, forum and payments on the website. It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. I'm very happy with the result [1]. It works 10x to 100x faster and it's much more flexible. My point is that people shouldn't be afraid of replacing their existing bloated system with something new and better. I was afraid that it would be impossible to replicate WordPress and plugins functionality that I needed, or it would take too much time and effort, but I was wrong. I'm glad I made the move. [1] https://www.traccar.org/ https://www.traccar.org/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- severine 8y ago
  I visited your site, I have no use for GPS trackers but I can say that the responsiveness and design are remarkable, good job!
- davewasthere 8y ago
  Yep. Your website is lovely. Under 200K for everything, looks nice, responsive and delivered very quickly. Nicely done!
- dagenix 8y ago
  > It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. That's kinda a lot of work. I'm not sure if you are saying that everyone should do the same - that doesn't sound realistic. The site does load fast and look great, though!
  - tananaev 8y ago
tzakrajs 8y ago
AMP is a practice in anti-competitive moat building that net-neutrality enforcement would obviate.
- k_sh 8y ago
  Is it? I've never heard of net neutrality being applied to web standards - only carriers and usage pricing/prioritization. To me, this sounds like antitrust, not net neutrality.
  - tzakrajs 8y ago
    AMP exists, primarily, because content publishers cannot afford to have the points of presence that Google has (e.g. Google Global Cache, Google Data Centers). The residential ISP oligopoly makes it so that only big players (e.g. Netflix, Google) who can peer directly with the ISPs get sufficient bandwidth to compete at a reasonable price. Everyone else gets to pay the premium to the middlemen (e.g. Akamai, Level 3) or bend the knee to Google for their market access via AMP. Publishers also must be competitive on the biggest search engine in town and the enhanced page ranking of AMP articles probably forces the issue for most.
arcliteIndira 8y ago
As a developer, I don't want to learn to make AMP pages. As a user, I look at AMP pages, and still want the real thing, not the AMP page. In general, on mobile, a lighter page is nice sometimes. As a rule, I don't want the typical metric fuck-ton of trash that SEO advertising bloat, that pages dump into a single page load. I don't want to sign up for email. I don't want to hear about how I can either accept cookies and continue reading because resistence is futile, or acknowlege that it's too late and also accept cookies, because everyone must accept all cookies, so just accept the cookies. I also don't need convenient share buttons. I'm not embedding anything. I'm not tweeting anything. It's not going on stumbleupon or pinterest or anywhere else. I'm not posting the link for this page on any other website. I'm not commenting with Disqus or in any other way, and I don't need 95% of the page scroll to consist of arguments between random people below the fold.
qualitative 8y ago
As a developer, I don't want to learn to make AMP pages. As a user, I look at AMP pages, and still want the real thing, not the AMP page. In general, on mobile, a lighter page is nice sometimes. As a rule, I don't want the typical metric fuck-ton of trash that SEO advertising bloat, that pages dump into a single page load. I don't want to sign up for email. I don't want to hear about how I can either accept cookies and continue reading because resistence is futile, or acknowlege that it's too late and also accept cookies, because everyone must accept all cookies, so just accept the cookies. I also don't need convenient share buttons. I'm not embedding anything. I'm not tweeting anything. It's not going on stumbleupon or pinterest or anywhere else. I'm not posting the link for this page on any other website. I'm not commenting with Disqus or in any other way, and I don't need 95% of the page scroll to consist of arguments between random people below the fold.
browsercoin 8y ago
what irks me is that there seems to be no plans to address the google.com issue. This really kills it for AMPs honestly. I guess PWA + AMP = PWAMP is not really a thing? edit: and of course pwamp.com is taken.
- patrickaljord 8y ago
  There you go https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Next thing you know... Reddit won't allow linking out of its website. All the content, even the advertisements will have to be built as Reddit posts.
trumped 8y ago
D-minus for AMP, and D-minus for Angular while I'm at it... the later one for obfuscating the web. Edit: I posted 1 comment in the last 2 days on HN and now try to post a link and I get this error: "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." please 1 upvote and I might be able to share an interesting story... LOL... the mods here would make a carnage if they were in a real power position. Thanks Dang... ?
- dang 8y ago
  We rate limit accounts when they post too many unsubstantive comments or get involved in flamewars. The fix is to give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. When people do that at hn@ycombinator.com we're happy to remove the rate limit. But you have to mean it!
LORD_GARTH 8y ago
telling someone that they will suffer financially if they dont AMP is like saying "nice community youve built it would be a shame if anything happened to it" and go ahead down vote all you want, i can evade your shadowban no problems. stop muzzling people who dont agree with the status quo
crstauf 8y ago
The real issue: marketers gave Google the power, influence, and leverage needed to push these sorts of things. In a way I like AMP, as it restores the simplicity of the web, and I wish that would've happened without Google making it necessary (to rank well). Here's hoping marketers learn to market outside of Google and Facebook, and the web is made simple again.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Marketers use Google and Facebook only because of laziness...Microsoft or someone needs to make a tool that can manage bids etc across every ad network for free and that alone would break Google's foothold in marketing. I've seen PPC/etc teams drop Bing/Yahoo/Twitter/Snap etc entirely, not because the leads weren't there, but because it becomes increasingly hard to manage large budgets across multiple ad networks. And Google integrates so well with Analytics, which just owns the space. It's a monopoly. I don't care if people can "choose" a different search engine, marketers don't and can't without a huge switching cost.
modells 8y ago
Google... fuck you very much.
bla2 8y ago
The domain is called "polemic digital" and -- surprise -- offers a polemic view to cash in on amp hate. That it's doing so well over here is a nice example of polemic half truths doing well on social media.
- drb91 8y ago
  Yes, really good social media would only discuss fact.
walterbell 8y ago
Google is also trying to get rid of URLs in Chrome, which dovetails with AMP certificate-signed content, https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change-interact-urls-website-security/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change-interact-u... > So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package. 2017 IETF proposal by Google: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... Video of a Chrome demo at 2018 AMP event, which looks like the latest Chrome proposal for hiding URLs in favor of “web identity”: https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ What happens if your “web identity” certificate expires or is revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate yearly fee from the domain name? Edit: Comments from Chrome dev team manager, https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616 & https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648 > URLs aren't usable, but people are forced to rely on them for so much -- browsing, security, sharing. Expect to see changes to how Chrome displays identity in the coming year.
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  This "hide the url from the user" is exactly what America Online did back in the day to try and keep everyone from leaving their garden. I remember being offended by it and trying to explain to people what that meant and that they should cancel their AOL accounts over it, with little success. How did Google get this bad? Why are we letting the internet devolve back to the early 90s?
  - refulgentis 8y ago
kemonocode 8y ago
Ah yes, after web designers and developers took years upon years to bloat webpages to the point they're almost unusable unless you're on a privileged position: inaccessible to the blind, infuriatingly slow to those with slow connections and laden with so much JavaScript and CSS and images, they're impractical to those with a laptop or any battery-powered device... now they band together against the evils of Google. Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?
- 43920 8y ago
  Simpler doesn't necessarily have to mean AMP, though. If Google really wanted to improve performance, they could just create some simple requirements - "if you want to appear at the top of the search results, your page can't take more than X seconds to load, use more than XXX kb of data", etc, and show warnings in the search console to websites that don't comply. The only reason to create AMP is to increase Google's control over websites so they can make more money selling ads.
- apostacy 8y ago
  This morning when I was reading the thread about how Google wants to kill the URL, nobody was seeing the more sinister implications at all. I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a phone made in the last 18 months? And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can have every device in the world block your server. Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us, then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should just accept our new overlords. Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries. This is hegemony. Not exaggerating. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009
mindfulhack 8y ago
I understand that Google may want more and more control over the web, but we need a free and open Internet, for both business innovation and non-economic societal growth. It's a good thing we have other data giants like Facebook and Amazon to say no to Google when moments arise like this. And I predict that future technologies will democratize the ability to 3D-print hardware to be used with open-source networking and web software to connect to each other in ways that don't depend on single web companies like Google in order for it to be cheap and nice to use. Think about this: no consumers care whether Google succeeds or not - people just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene.
- bduerst 8y ago
  I'm not sure I completely agree - I think the internet is so laissez faire that it attracts centralized powers to fill the vacuum it creates. The future of the internet and what it looks like is probably going to depend heavily on the net neutrality legislation that is passed on the next decade.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  >people just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene. Google has enough services that even if google searching became obsolete, they could fall back on their other services that are currently free like email and docs. Apple isnt quite like this. A bad/boring iphone=end of Apple.
ehnto 8y ago
AMP has horrible UX for mobile, I hate when I click on an AMP link because I am suddenly in some wierd web Twilight zone where the UX for my browser has changed for the worse. It has been a net negative for usability in my book.
- anitil 8y ago
  I always end up scrolling back on the url to change 'amp' to 'm'. Manually editing a URL on a mobile device, it just makes me sad.
  - binomialxenon 8y ago
    On desktop I use an extension that redirects any AMP page (I don't come across them often, but people share links) to the canonical page. It would most likely be possible to install it in Firefox mobile too. I also have all amp-related addresses blocked in my host file, which is probably less feasible on mobile.
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  I haven't had the misfortune of coming across an AMP page in awhile (perhaps due to using Firefox exclusively on mobile) but this bothers me too. The worst part about it is the lack of a search feature. It's something that has been implemented into every other web browsing experience for decades, yet they are somehow that far behind.
- AJ007 8y ago
  This is how it looks to an average consumer: here is a shitty version of Apple's reader mode that doesn't really work, brought to you by Google.com.
- hegz 8y ago
  Amp websites often don't even work for me because the site owners were unable to get it working in amp so they give you this half baked crap.
- eudora 8y ago
  I hate how I can't see the real address without two clicks, and you have to scroll all the way to the top of what might be a massive article to make the bar appear
testcross 8y ago
"Google wants to kill the web" should be the title of this article.
Animats 8y ago
It worked before. Google converted Netnews into Google Groups.
supernintendo 8y ago
The actual title of this article seems more appropriate: "Google AMP Can Go To Hell"
the_watcher 8y ago
Good god, please no.
dagenix 8y ago
> The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where almost no two websites use the same code. It’s extremely rare to find websites that look good, have great functionality, and are fully W3C compliant. > All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. > AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard). > An AMPified web makes Google’s life so much easier. They would no longer struggle to crawl and index websites, they would require significantly less effort to extract meaningful content from webpages, and would enable them to rank the best possible pages in any given search result. > The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience. > No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does address some very real problems. These are some admittedly cherry picked quotes - but, the article seems to make that point as well, even if it disagrees with Google's approach. What I'd love to hear about is a different approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it could be done in a weekend. Actual code.
miluge 8y ago
I know that you are one of my main traffic provider big G but you can go to hell with AMP.
cjhanks 8y ago
The AMP thing continues to make me a little perturbed. Because theoretically the damn thing should work - Google's QUIC protocol is often the only protocol my shitty internet can support. It's wonderful. Shouldn't AMP be using QUIC, does it? If it does - then there is something seriously wrong with the cache/prefetch algorithm in the AMP CDN. Because sometimes cold pages refuse to load!
erik_seaberg 8y ago
Have they fixed the content negotiation thing yet? I want to serve either valid HTML or AMP based on what the caller supports. Inventing a different URL for every possible presentation is a problem that HTTP already solved.
Fej 8y ago
One thing I don't understand: why does Bing push AMP in their news section? It's not a different instance either, it's the canonical AMP Project.
MikeGale 8y ago
I always thought this was pretty simple. Google wants surveillance of everybody. AMP is a way to advance that. You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.
- dbbk 8y ago
  You have to first understand what AMP is before you can revise the URL though. The vast majority of people do not know what AMP is, or that they interact with it.
greenspot 8y ago
I am bit surprised about this article. The momentum around AMP slowed down. AMP pages do not rank that well anymore as when they were introduced. Also within Google, there is no unanimity about the future of AMP. But maybe I got the signals wrong.
baxtr 8y ago
The best thing about AMP? It’s the chain symbol on top of the screen that gives you the “real” page link.
Jazgot 8y ago
Well, Google implementation of AMP is major reason why I mostly stopped using Google search. They seems to be blind or just don't care any more.
lokimedes 8y ago
How about going back to WAP, it was such a good idea at the time.
da_murvel 8y ago
I've never worked with AMP but reading about it I'm glad I haven't. For me personally, I think the biggest issue with AMP is "The project enables the creation of websites and ADS that are consistently fast ..." (taken from https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/, capitalization by me). Yeah it's a google project, but really, do they honestly believe that internet is for ads? I might be living in a bubble, but I've never heard anyone speak fondly of ads. I worked for a media company for years which had ads on their news sites and no one liked them. They were more of a necessary evil needed to bring in some money, if we could have survived on subscriptions alone we would never have had ads on our sites. Also, I think the amount of ad blockers in use speak for itself.
scoom 8y ago
I can't wait for AMP to die. Too many broken sites and translating urls away from google's attempt at taking over their hosting.
Iem3ohvi 8y ago
amp.js? No thanks. A blessed subset of the HTML, CSS and media that is optimized for load times and memory footprint? Ok.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Orrr we could just demand that people build sites like this willingly and then we all don't have to let megabucks-Google become the arbiter of right and wrong?
  - Iem3ohvi 8y ago
    Well, that just isn't happening and hasn't happened for years. So someone stepping up to define a standard focused on performance is a good thing in principle. You also need incentives for that standard to get adopted. Of course google shouldn't be the only player here, others should participate in this too.
empreintes 8y ago
for god shake... AMP can go to hell
formatkaka 8y ago
Do no evil GOOGLE
xiaodai 8y ago
I actually like AMP because when I see the symbol I know the page will load almost instantly when I click on it. People that spend time on getting their page AMP-ready has less of the garbage click-bait stuff.
eudora 8y ago
Look at this hilarious list of amp caches, showing what Google considers a decentralised standard https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...
- xg15 8y ago
  Hey, it's more than one! /s
  - arihant 8y ago
    And quiet opposites as well. Baidu and Microsoft are major investors in Cloudflare. But this list has to grow, by a lot.
    - nannal 8y ago
      so like, double or..
pawurb 8y ago
My 2 cents on AMP https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance Long story short: you can achieve similar performance and UX without resorting to adopting a proprietary standard.
- romanovcode 8y ago
  It's not about performance, it's about getting more points in google pagerank.
  - pawurb 8y ago
    SEO rating, user experience and website performance are closely related.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      True, but Google's going more aggressive and putting sites that use their AMP standards higher than those that don't - or in other words, they penalize good / fast websites to push AMP websites higher.
johnlbevan2 8y ago
tldr; In this case AMP != Apache + MySql + PHP
red_admiral 8y ago
I'm no fan of AMP, but: The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc. If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests. EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the "click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.
- tyler33 8y ago
  AMP is the monopolistic dream of google, they want all the internet on their servers, and thats not only bad, also it is ilegal
  - red_admiral 8y ago
    Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect robots.txt). I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR). Choose your poison.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    Not just Google though - Facebook wants it too (going as far as creating their own internet bubble where Facebook is free, the rest isn't), and Apple (with Apple News), and if Microsoft had a more significant internet presence I'm sure they'd be all over it as well. They prefer to dominate the professional world though, also plenty of money to be had.
nkkollaw 8y ago
You have to give it to Google, they ambitious: people use ad blockers, they want to change how every single website is made to be able to bypass ad blocker. I think it's just genius.
mvaliente2001 8y ago
I won't comment about the merits of AMP, just something that bugged me about the first paragraph. The author questions if a project is open source due to their authors and main contributors, which seems very odd. A license is a license is a license, don't confuse it with external issues.
blattimwind 8y ago
And I want ice water in hell. Looks like we're both going to be disappointed when we get there.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
I knew the headline was coming. Just waiting for the day they start charging for using AMP.
babuskov 8y ago
In my experience CloudFlare has too many false positives outside of US/EU networks. I often cannot access websites that are behind CluodFlare. It would be a really sad day if they became a gateway to 50% of web traffic.
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  Where are you seeing this?
  - babuskov 8y ago
    In Serbia (not to be confused with Siberia, which is something completely different ;)
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I agree with your point (based on my travels), but it would be nice if you could elaborate on what the connection to AMP is. Same kind of market dominance with potential abuse?
  - seriocomic 8y ago
    I'm assuming that comment is in reference to Cloudflare also being in the AMP game, but acting as an AMP cache. In their words: > Until now, AMP-enabled links were only accessible through the likes of Google, Twitter, Bing News, and Facebook. Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links democratizes the power of AMP for free across all Cloudflare plans.
Kalium 8y ago
Good. In my experience, AMP pages are leaps and bounds better than the full-fat experience. There's far less tracking, far fewer ads, and less asynchronously loaded core content. All of these mean that the page loads much faster and is a generally better experience.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
If G wants this, then there must be government oversight. One person (as corporations are defined as a person) can not be the sole dispenser of information. That’s too much power.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Is government oversight any better though? I mean controlling information by the government is something we should also be cautious of (in addition to big corporations who have the power to sway public opinion and elections by prioritizing certain content)
- hallihax 8y ago
  I suspect a large part of the reason G wants this is because the government(s) want oversight. There has been a concerted effort in the last few years for governments to pressure web giants into creating centralised means of controlling what users see. Make absolutely no mistake: governments will love this idea.
tempodox 8y ago
Of course the Goog wants every web site on earth in their pocket. Now that they own more than half of the Internet, they're in a perfect position for <del>coercion</del> persuasion.
paradite 8y ago
I don't think Google is at wrong here for pushing its standard for its business. It is just doing what it's expected to do as a business. The problem is people getting comfortable with Google and depend on Google too much. In the end, Google is in a position to force decisions on everyone. If you are not happy with the way Google is doing things, stop using Google products and develop or use alternatives.
adarsh_thampy 8y ago
Google simply wants to build a walled garden which it controls. The whole point of AMP was to speed up sites on slow networks. Increasingly, I am seeing AMP even on extremely fast networks. Why?
dreamcompiler 8y ago
The solution to speedy web pages is for the browser makers to give the user fine-grained control over javascript. E.G. your page gets 100kB of js (which could be gzipped) and then no more js for you. Or we throttle your js performance after that. Or you have to pay the user $.001 for each 100kB after the first 100kB.
- james33 8y ago
  Not every web page is "just" a web page. It is perfectly legitimate to have 1-2MB of JS on a page if that page is a full game for example.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    So let the user whitelist those. That's part of what "fine-grained" implies.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
i want a pony
iamleppert 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc This video is hilarious. Applause for a slight cosmetic change to a URL that basically amounts to a subdomain? How do people at Google find such work fulfilling? If I was given such a meaningless project I'd be depressed. It seems that at a certain point such large companies run out of real work to do, and insist on making such changes that don't really matter anymore just to create work for people to do and present on stage. This is going against everything that the web stands for. I assume the next logical step in this line of thinking is for Google to require developers to start making pull requests to Chrome when we want to change the style of the text on one of our pages? It seems like what could have happened at Google is they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game they are willing to neuter the web in order to do it. This is exactly what happens when you hire an aggressive queen and don't have any checks and balances in your behemoth tech company that is becoming more and more accustomed to her dark soul.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  > they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game That... does not make any sense. If anything, it will increase the relative lead of Apple in the battery life game. It's about not having information being more and more stuck in Apple News / FB because those silos are more efficient than the web. If people use apps instead of the web, Google will earn less money.

There are many things Google wants, for the past decade most people have been going along with those demands. Perhaps it's time for us to tell Google what we want.

xvector 8y ago
Not possible. Google has the web in a vice grip. Don't agree with their policies, drop in ranking, no one sees your disagreements.
- drb91 8y ago
  This is only true for people who rely on google searches to drive traffic.

mikhailt 8y ago

Oh wow, these type of behaviors is why I’m starting to lean onto the idea of splitting these monopolists into their own companies. I wasn’t sure why it made any sense in the other article today from The Verge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264 But now...

nevir 8y ago
The headline is also, probably in reality: "A small subset of Google wants...'
PinkMilkshake 8y ago
I would much prefer a market based solution. Searching news on Google is a bad experience. AMP has made it even worse. There’s room in search.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I still miss when Reader was still very popular.

petepete 8y ago

The idea of moving en masse to a technology that's controlled by a single company just doesn't sit right.

37 8y ago
Isn't this what Google is essentially trying to achieve? Email, video streaming, advertising, etc...
- _louisr_ 8y ago
  Buy a 5$/month Protonmail account and forward your gmail to it, and slowly migrate all of your various email-authenticated services to point to your protonmail account. Plus Protonmail makes it very easy to run email from a domain that you already own, like your portfolio domain.
  - hjek 8y ago
    Are you actually willing to pay for an email provider that don't support SMTP and IMAP?
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      It's baffling that people are willing to pay for another walled garden.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - alanh 8y ago
      IDK about Protomail, but Fastmail of course supports these protocols. Happy customer here, as are more than a handful of HNers. Reply to sibling: Why would anyone call an email provider a walled garden, especially if using your own domain name?!
      - 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago

Let's not pretend we're surprised.

xg15 8y ago

I don't like AMP at all and fully agree with all the lock-in concerns - but I didn't find this post particularly convincing. This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone wants to take that privilege away from him. I can't agree with that. Examples: > The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website’s regular version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item, every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery. So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original? > For years Google has been nudging webmasters to create better websites – ‘better’ meaning ‘easier for Google to understand’. Technologies like XML sitemaps and schema.org structured data are strongly supported by Google because they make the search engine’s life easier. Other initiatives like disavow files and rel=nofollow help Google keep its link graph clean and free from egregious spam. All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. In other words, a Google-shaped web. This is a battle Google has been fighting for decades. Sitemaps and structured data were the non-proprietary attempts to structure the web. Those could have made the web more accessible for everyone, not just Google. They are something fundamentally different than AMP. Yet, he condemns them too? Why? He seems to argue that the chaos and messiness of the web infrastructure is itself a quality that should be defended. Why would that be the case?

unethical_ban 8y ago
>So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original? Google is using its dominance in search (again) to force sites to offer AMP versions. Like a "reader view", and lacking evidence at the moment, I bet many sites are building AMP versions with faster load times but reduced features to comply. Now Google is saying "Build your entire site according to our spec, or we'll de-rank you on search". That is a very bold move, and one that would be making front-page news if they said it straight-up in a way that Buzzfeed could write about.

Havoc 8y ago

Reminds me of "embrace extend extinguish" except google skipped the "do as you're told part"

newnewpdro 8y ago

If you work for Google, could you please quit.

meesterdude 8y ago
i know i'll get just as downvoted, but I agree with this. Googlers: you are bright, talented and don't need to sell out the future of the web to build interesting and worthwhile things. Your paycheck, however large, is not worth what you are taking away from future generations. Do the right thing and quit.

jancsika 8y ago

Someone tell me about amp-iframe. Do those restrictions[1] result in a browsing experience with 1. significantly less resource usage/battery drain? 2. less distraction? 3. less of my user data flying off to who knows where? [1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-iframe https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ifr...

ccvannorman 8y ago

As a user I hate AMP. I find myself on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! It's NOT the canonical link, but a Google Amp link. I wanted to share the post to a desktop. So now I have to find my way out of this AMP hole just to share a website. Personally I could care less about "speed improvements." If the site loads slow I'll juat skip it. Amp existing to help that happen less doesn't really affect me. I probably waste too much time surfing anyway; maybe I WANT to filter slow websites on my own (by ending my search/session).

type0 8y ago
> on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! Eh easy now, they will fix that for soon /s https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-replacement-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-replacemen...

millstone 8y ago

AMP is in two parts: the HTML/JS spec, and the Google implementation and cache. Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the project? On my iPhone AMP is frustratingly buggy: rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't disappear on scroll, Reader mode works inconsistently, etc. But these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.

wmf 8y ago
The concern is that Google can unilaterally change the spec any way they want, so even if it's fine now it may get worse in the future.
- karmelapple 8y ago
  I think OP was sort of getting at the idea of AMP becoming a standard owned externally to google. But the likelihood of that happening seems... low.
  - sverhagen 8y ago
    Wouldn't that be an excellent solution for Google to silence the critics? (Excellent for them, not for us.) Donate the whole thing to a non-profit like Apache, who barely have the manpower to do more than host it, then still regain control by having many of the contributors on payroll?
    - cliffordthedog 8y ago
      Probably, but I doubt they even do that. Is google the worst company around when it comes to this sort of almost faux open source?
    - wmf 8y ago
      The real complaints are not about AMP per se but about Google's market power, so it's not clear that Google can do anything to satisfy critics. (Even splitting search into a separate company would still leave that company as a monopoly.)

brosirmandude 8y ago

Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog... As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.

da02 8y ago
What does a marketer do on a daily basis? Edit: Removed "Is it different than advertising?"
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  That's a little like asking "What does a blacksmith do? Is it different than making horseshoes?"
  - da02 8y ago
    I know it was a "stupid" question. But, sometimes I do that in the hopes that someone will provide a guide to a better understanding of the topic. Plus, HN is a good place for anecdotal stuff and "war stories" that are hard to find on other parts of the WWW.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - ladzoppelin 8y ago
    Marketing is extremely technical these days, IMO. Learning to work with API's and even learning Python seems like it would really help anyone in most fields.
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    I think it's a fair question. It's not an industry you hear lots about day to day, so the average person has no idea what's involved other than "they make ads". I've worked in large companies with 20+ person Marketing/PR departments and I'm not actually sure what their day to day job entails, and would totally be curious to know more. It's a major part of society these days, whether we love it or hate it. We all know IT has phone support roles, application development, system admins, project managers, etc... but I couldn't really tell you what all the different roles are in marketing.

45ghrthr54 8y ago

The time has already passed to put this giant down. For a business that lost it's capability of innovating at least 10 years ago, even having all of those great brains as their workforce and plentiful money, they try too hard pushing this kind of bullshit into the industry. Stop trying to enforce unnatural and irrational changes just for gaining protagonism on something you DON'T DESERVE and shouldn't even mess about. It's already annoying having to load your analytics present in almost every modern website, despise the fact that most of the world don't even know about the existence of this, neither agreed with(cannot choose to block something you don't even know about). Are you thinking it's overreaction? wait for tomorrow. Keep underestimating what they are doing.

tananaev 8y ago

I believe that Google has good intentions behind pushing AMP. They want websites to load faster. Everyone wants that. I especially hate those bloated news websites. But AMP is a wrong solution for the problem. If Google wants to make web pages faster, it can more heavily penalise slow and heavy pages in search. I used to host my website using WordPress with a lot of plugins. It was incredibly slow and unreliable. Eventually I decided to replace it with my own custom solution developed from scratch. We had blog, forum and payments on the website. It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. I'm very happy with the result [1]. It works 10x to 100x faster and it's much more flexible. My point is that people shouldn't be afraid of replacing their existing bloated system with something new and better. I was afraid that it would be impossible to replicate WordPress and plugins functionality that I needed, or it would take too much time and effort, but I was wrong. I'm glad I made the move. [1] https://www.traccar.org/ https://www.traccar.org/

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
severine 8y ago
I visited your site, I have no use for GPS trackers but I can say that the responsiveness and design are remarkable, good job!
davewasthere 8y ago
Yep. Your website is lovely. Under 200K for everything, looks nice, responsive and delivered very quickly. Nicely done!
dagenix 8y ago
> It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. That's kinda a lot of work. I'm not sure if you are saying that everyone should do the same - that doesn't sound realistic. The site does load fast and look great, though!
- tananaev 8y ago

tzakrajs 8y ago

AMP is a practice in anti-competitive moat building that net-neutrality enforcement would obviate.

k_sh 8y ago
Is it? I've never heard of net neutrality being applied to web standards - only carriers and usage pricing/prioritization. To me, this sounds like antitrust, not net neutrality.
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  AMP exists, primarily, because content publishers cannot afford to have the points of presence that Google has (e.g. Google Global Cache, Google Data Centers). The residential ISP oligopoly makes it so that only big players (e.g. Netflix, Google) who can peer directly with the ISPs get sufficient bandwidth to compete at a reasonable price. Everyone else gets to pay the premium to the middlemen (e.g. Akamai, Level 3) or bend the knee to Google for their market access via AMP. Publishers also must be competitive on the biggest search engine in town and the enhanced page ranking of AMP articles probably forces the issue for most.

arcliteIndira 8y ago

As a developer, I don't want to learn to make AMP pages. As a user, I look at AMP pages, and still want the real thing, not the AMP page. In general, on mobile, a lighter page is nice sometimes. As a rule, I don't want the typical metric fuck-ton of trash that SEO advertising bloat, that pages dump into a single page load. I don't want to sign up for email. I don't want to hear about how I can either accept cookies and continue reading because resistence is futile, or acknowlege that it's too late and also accept cookies, because everyone must accept all cookies, so just accept the cookies. I also don't need convenient share buttons. I'm not embedding anything. I'm not tweeting anything. It's not going on stumbleupon or pinterest or anywhere else. I'm not posting the link for this page on any other website. I'm not commenting with Disqus or in any other way, and I don't need 95% of the page scroll to consist of arguments between random people below the fold.

qualitative 8y ago

browsercoin 8y ago

what irks me is that there seems to be no plans to address the google.com issue. This really kills it for AMPs honestly. I guess PWA + AMP = PWAMP is not really a thing? edit: and of course pwamp.com is taken.

patrickaljord 8y ago
There you go https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

Next thing you know... Reddit won't allow linking out of its website. All the content, even the advertisements will have to be built as Reddit posts.

trumped 8y ago

D-minus for AMP, and D-minus for Angular while I'm at it... the later one for obfuscating the web. Edit: I posted 1 comment in the last 2 days on HN and now try to post a link and I get this error: "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." please 1 upvote and I might be able to share an interesting story... LOL... the mods here would make a carnage if they were in a real power position. Thanks Dang... ?

dang 8y ago
We rate limit accounts when they post too many unsubstantive comments or get involved in flamewars. The fix is to give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. When people do that at hn@ycombinator.com we're happy to remove the rate limit. But you have to mean it!

LORD_GARTH 8y ago

telling someone that they will suffer financially if they dont AMP is like saying "nice community youve built it would be a shame if anything happened to it" and go ahead down vote all you want, i can evade your shadowban no problems. stop muzzling people who dont agree with the status quo

crstauf 8y ago

The real issue: marketers gave Google the power, influence, and leverage needed to push these sorts of things. In a way I like AMP, as it restores the simplicity of the web, and I wish that would've happened without Google making it necessary (to rank well). Here's hoping marketers learn to market outside of Google and Facebook, and the web is made simple again.

partiallypro 8y ago
Marketers use Google and Facebook only because of laziness...Microsoft or someone needs to make a tool that can manage bids etc across every ad network for free and that alone would break Google's foothold in marketing. I've seen PPC/etc teams drop Bing/Yahoo/Twitter/Snap etc entirely, not because the leads weren't there, but because it becomes increasingly hard to manage large budgets across multiple ad networks. And Google integrates so well with Analytics, which just owns the space. It's a monopoly. I don't care if people can "choose" a different search engine, marketers don't and can't without a huge switching cost.

modells 8y ago

Google... fuck you very much.

bla2 8y ago

The domain is called "polemic digital" and -- surprise -- offers a polemic view to cash in on amp hate. That it's doing so well over here is a nice example of polemic half truths doing well on social media.

drb91 8y ago
Yes, really good social media would only discuss fact.

walterbell 8y ago

Google is also trying to get rid of URLs in Chrome, which dovetails with AMP certificate-signed content, https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change-interact-urls-website-security/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change-interact-u... > So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package. 2017 IETF proposal by Google: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... Video of a Chrome demo at 2018 AMP event, which looks like the latest Chrome proposal for hiding URLs in favor of “web identity”: https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ What happens if your “web identity” certificate expires or is revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate yearly fee from the domain name? Edit: Comments from Chrome dev team manager, https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616 & https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648 > URLs aren't usable, but people are forced to rely on them for so much -- browsing, security, sharing. Expect to see changes to how Chrome displays identity in the coming year.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago
This "hide the url from the user" is exactly what America Online did back in the day to try and keep everyone from leaving their garden. I remember being offended by it and trying to explain to people what that meant and that they should cancel their AOL accounts over it, with little success. How did Google get this bad? Why are we letting the internet devolve back to the early 90s?
- refulgentis 8y ago

kemonocode 8y ago

Ah yes, after web designers and developers took years upon years to bloat webpages to the point they're almost unusable unless you're on a privileged position: inaccessible to the blind, infuriatingly slow to those with slow connections and laden with so much JavaScript and CSS and images, they're impractical to those with a laptop or any battery-powered device... now they band together against the evils of Google. Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?

43920 8y ago
Simpler doesn't necessarily have to mean AMP, though. If Google really wanted to improve performance, they could just create some simple requirements - "if you want to appear at the top of the search results, your page can't take more than X seconds to load, use more than XXX kb of data", etc, and show warnings in the search console to websites that don't comply. The only reason to create AMP is to increase Google's control over websites so they can make more money selling ads.
apostacy 8y ago
This morning when I was reading the thread about how Google wants to kill the URL, nobody was seeing the more sinister implications at all. I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a phone made in the last 18 months? And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can have every device in the world block your server. Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us, then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should just accept our new overlords. Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries. This is hegemony. Not exaggerating. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009

mindfulhack 8y ago

I understand that Google may want more and more control over the web, but we need a free and open Internet, for both business innovation and non-economic societal growth. It's a good thing we have other data giants like Facebook and Amazon to say no to Google when moments arise like this. And I predict that future technologies will democratize the ability to 3D-print hardware to be used with open-source networking and web software to connect to each other in ways that don't depend on single web companies like Google in order for it to be cheap and nice to use. Think about this: no consumers care whether Google succeeds or not - people just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene.

bduerst 8y ago
I'm not sure I completely agree - I think the internet is so laissez faire that it attracts centralized powers to fill the vacuum it creates. The future of the internet and what it looks like is probably going to depend heavily on the net neutrality legislation that is passed on the next decade.
MrEfficiency 8y ago
>people just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene. Google has enough services that even if google searching became obsolete, they could fall back on their other services that are currently free like email and docs. Apple isnt quite like this. A bad/boring iphone=end of Apple.

ehnto 8y ago

AMP has horrible UX for mobile, I hate when I click on an AMP link because I am suddenly in some wierd web Twilight zone where the UX for my browser has changed for the worse. It has been a net negative for usability in my book.

anitil 8y ago
I always end up scrolling back on the url to change 'amp' to 'm'. Manually editing a URL on a mobile device, it just makes me sad.
- binomialxenon 8y ago
  On desktop I use an extension that redirects any AMP page (I don't come across them often, but people share links) to the canonical page. It would most likely be possible to install it in Firefox mobile too. I also have all amp-related addresses blocked in my host file, which is probably less feasible on mobile.
MiddleEndian 8y ago
I haven't had the misfortune of coming across an AMP page in awhile (perhaps due to using Firefox exclusively on mobile) but this bothers me too. The worst part about it is the lack of a search feature. It's something that has been implemented into every other web browsing experience for decades, yet they are somehow that far behind.
AJ007 8y ago
This is how it looks to an average consumer: here is a shitty version of Apple's reader mode that doesn't really work, brought to you by Google.com.
hegz 8y ago
Amp websites often don't even work for me because the site owners were unable to get it working in amp so they give you this half baked crap.
eudora 8y ago
I hate how I can't see the real address without two clicks, and you have to scroll all the way to the top of what might be a massive article to make the bar appear

testcross 8y ago

"Google wants to kill the web" should be the title of this article.

Animats 8y ago

It worked before. Google converted Netnews into Google Groups.

supernintendo 8y ago

The actual title of this article seems more appropriate: "Google AMP Can Go To Hell"

the_watcher 8y ago

Good god, please no.

dagenix 8y ago

> The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where almost no two websites use the same code. It’s extremely rare to find websites that look good, have great functionality, and are fully W3C compliant. > All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. > AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard). > An AMPified web makes Google’s life so much easier. They would no longer struggle to crawl and index websites, they would require significantly less effort to extract meaningful content from webpages, and would enable them to rank the best possible pages in any given search result. > The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience. > No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does address some very real problems. These are some admittedly cherry picked quotes - but, the article seems to make that point as well, even if it disagrees with Google's approach. What I'd love to hear about is a different approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it could be done in a weekend. Actual code.

miluge 8y ago

I know that you are one of my main traffic provider big G but you can go to hell with AMP.

cjhanks 8y ago

The AMP thing continues to make me a little perturbed. Because theoretically the damn thing should work - Google's QUIC protocol is often the only protocol my shitty internet can support. It's wonderful. Shouldn't AMP be using QUIC, does it? If it does - then there is something seriously wrong with the cache/prefetch algorithm in the AMP CDN. Because sometimes cold pages refuse to load!

erik_seaberg 8y ago

Have they fixed the content negotiation thing yet? I want to serve either valid HTML or AMP based on what the caller supports. Inventing a different URL for every possible presentation is a problem that HTTP already solved.

Fej 8y ago

One thing I don't understand: why does Bing push AMP in their news section? It's not a different instance either, it's the canonical AMP Project.

MikeGale 8y ago

I always thought this was pretty simple. Google wants surveillance of everybody. AMP is a way to advance that. You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.

dbbk 8y ago
You have to first understand what AMP is before you can revise the URL though. The vast majority of people do not know what AMP is, or that they interact with it.

greenspot 8y ago

I am bit surprised about this article. The momentum around AMP slowed down. AMP pages do not rank that well anymore as when they were introduced. Also within Google, there is no unanimity about the future of AMP. But maybe I got the signals wrong.

baxtr 8y ago

The best thing about AMP? It’s the chain symbol on top of the screen that gives you the “real” page link.

Jazgot 8y ago

Well, Google implementation of AMP is major reason why I mostly stopped using Google search. They seems to be blind or just don't care any more.

lokimedes 8y ago

How about going back to WAP, it was such a good idea at the time.

da_murvel 8y ago

I've never worked with AMP but reading about it I'm glad I haven't. For me personally, I think the biggest issue with AMP is "The project enables the creation of websites and ADS that are consistently fast ..." (taken from https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/, capitalization by me). Yeah it's a google project, but really, do they honestly believe that internet is for ads? I might be living in a bubble, but I've never heard anyone speak fondly of ads. I worked for a media company for years which had ads on their news sites and no one liked them. They were more of a necessary evil needed to bring in some money, if we could have survived on subscriptions alone we would never have had ads on our sites. Also, I think the amount of ad blockers in use speak for itself.

scoom 8y ago

I can't wait for AMP to die. Too many broken sites and translating urls away from google's attempt at taking over their hosting.

Iem3ohvi 8y ago

amp.js? No thanks. A blessed subset of the HTML, CSS and media that is optimized for load times and memory footprint? Ok.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Orrr we could just demand that people build sites like this willingly and then we all don't have to let megabucks-Google become the arbiter of right and wrong?
- Iem3ohvi 8y ago
  Well, that just isn't happening and hasn't happened for years. So someone stepping up to define a standard focused on performance is a good thing in principle. You also need incentives for that standard to get adopted. Of course google shouldn't be the only player here, others should participate in this too.

empreintes 8y ago

for god shake... AMP can go to hell

formatkaka 8y ago

Do no evil GOOGLE

xiaodai 8y ago

I actually like AMP because when I see the symbol I know the page will load almost instantly when I click on it. People that spend time on getting their page AMP-ready has less of the garbage click-bait stuff.

eudora 8y ago

Look at this hilarious list of amp caches, showing what Google considers a decentralised standard https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...

xg15 8y ago
Hey, it's more than one! /s
- arihant 8y ago
  And quiet opposites as well. Baidu and Microsoft are major investors in Cloudflare. But this list has to grow, by a lot.
  - nannal 8y ago
    so like, double or..

pawurb 8y ago

My 2 cents on AMP https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance Long story short: you can achieve similar performance and UX without resorting to adopting a proprietary standard.

romanovcode 8y ago
It's not about performance, it's about getting more points in google pagerank.
- pawurb 8y ago
  SEO rating, user experience and website performance are closely related.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    True, but Google's going more aggressive and putting sites that use their AMP standards higher than those that don't - or in other words, they penalize good / fast websites to push AMP websites higher.

johnlbevan2 8y ago

tldr; In this case AMP != Apache + MySql + PHP

red_admiral 8y ago

I'm no fan of AMP, but: The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc. If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests. EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the "click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.

tyler33 8y ago
AMP is the monopolistic dream of google, they want all the internet on their servers, and thats not only bad, also it is ilegal
- red_admiral 8y ago
  Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect robots.txt). I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR). Choose your poison.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Not just Google though - Facebook wants it too (going as far as creating their own internet bubble where Facebook is free, the rest isn't), and Apple (with Apple News), and if Microsoft had a more significant internet presence I'm sure they'd be all over it as well. They prefer to dominate the professional world though, also plenty of money to be had.

nkkollaw 8y ago

You have to give it to Google, they ambitious: people use ad blockers, they want to change how every single website is made to be able to bypass ad blocker. I think it's just genius.

mvaliente2001 8y ago

I won't comment about the merits of AMP, just something that bugged me about the first paragraph. The author questions if a project is open source due to their authors and main contributors, which seems very odd. A license is a license is a license, don't confuse it with external issues.

blattimwind 8y ago

And I want ice water in hell. Looks like we're both going to be disappointed when we get there.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

I knew the headline was coming. Just waiting for the day they start charging for using AMP.

babuskov 8y ago

In my experience CloudFlare has too many false positives outside of US/EU networks. I often cannot access websites that are behind CluodFlare. It would be a really sad day if they became a gateway to 50% of web traffic.

jgrahamc 8y ago
Where are you seeing this?
- babuskov 8y ago
  In Serbia (not to be confused with Siberia, which is something completely different ;)
vanderZwan 8y ago
I agree with your point (based on my travels), but it would be nice if you could elaborate on what the connection to AMP is. Same kind of market dominance with potential abuse?
- seriocomic 8y ago
  I'm assuming that comment is in reference to Cloudflare also being in the AMP game, but acting as an AMP cache. In their words: > Until now, AMP-enabled links were only accessible through the likes of Google, Twitter, Bing News, and Facebook. Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links democratizes the power of AMP for free across all Cloudflare plans.

Kalium 8y ago

Good. In my experience, AMP pages are leaps and bounds better than the full-fat experience. There's far less tracking, far fewer ads, and less asynchronously loaded core content. All of these mean that the page loads much faster and is a generally better experience.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

If G wants this, then there must be government oversight. One person (as corporations are defined as a person) can not be the sole dispenser of information. That’s too much power.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Is government oversight any better though? I mean controlling information by the government is something we should also be cautious of (in addition to big corporations who have the power to sway public opinion and elections by prioritizing certain content)
hallihax 8y ago
I suspect a large part of the reason G wants this is because the government(s) want oversight. There has been a concerted effort in the last few years for governments to pressure web giants into creating centralised means of controlling what users see. Make absolutely no mistake: governments will love this idea.

tempodox 8y ago

Of course the Goog wants every web site on earth in their pocket. Now that they own more than half of the Internet, they're in a perfect position for <del>coercion</del> persuasion.

paradite 8y ago

I don't think Google is at wrong here for pushing its standard for its business. It is just doing what it's expected to do as a business. The problem is people getting comfortable with Google and depend on Google too much. In the end, Google is in a position to force decisions on everyone. If you are not happy with the way Google is doing things, stop using Google products and develop or use alternatives.

adarsh_thampy 8y ago

Google simply wants to build a walled garden which it controls. The whole point of AMP was to speed up sites on slow networks. Increasingly, I am seeing AMP even on extremely fast networks. Why?

dreamcompiler 8y ago

The solution to speedy web pages is for the browser makers to give the user fine-grained control over javascript. E.G. your page gets 100kB of js (which could be gzipped) and then no more js for you. Or we throttle your js performance after that. Or you have to pay the user $.001 for each 100kB after the first 100kB.

james33 8y ago
Not every web page is "just" a web page. It is perfectly legitimate to have 1-2MB of JS on a page if that page is a full game for example.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  So let the user whitelist those. That's part of what "fine-grained" implies.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

i want a pony

iamleppert 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc This video is hilarious. Applause for a slight cosmetic change to a URL that basically amounts to a subdomain? How do people at Google find such work fulfilling? If I was given such a meaningless project I'd be depressed. It seems that at a certain point such large companies run out of real work to do, and insist on making such changes that don't really matter anymore just to create work for people to do and present on stage. This is going against everything that the web stands for. I assume the next logical step in this line of thinking is for Google to require developers to start making pull requests to Chrome when we want to change the style of the text on one of our pages? It seems like what could have happened at Google is they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game they are willing to neuter the web in order to do it. This is exactly what happens when you hire an aggressive queen and don't have any checks and balances in your behemoth tech company that is becoming more and more accustomed to her dark soul.

Jyaif 8y ago
> they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game That... does not make any sense. If anything, it will increase the relative lead of Apple in the battery life game. It's about not having information being more and more stuck in Apple News / FB because those silos are more efficient than the web. If people use apps instead of the web, Google will earn less money.