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> it's that if we were collectively trying to solve the problem of page bloat, we could probably do a much better job in general than AMP does. There are a lot

> it's that if we were collectively trying to solve the problem of page bloat, we could probably do a much better job in general than AMP does. There are a lot of people interested in reducing page bloat. Outside of AMP, I'm not aware of any other efforts. (Discounting just telling people to write better pages which is basically just telling people to status quo harder) One of the repeated critisicms of AMP seems to be that its debloating could easily be done better - but if it's so easy, why is no one doing it?

zzzcpan 8y ago
> (Discounting just telling people to write better pages which is basically just telling people to status quo harder) Well, AMP is just that, telling people to status quo harder, but with incentives from a monopoly (or rather abuse of power, forcing others to do that) and in a specific way said monopoly wants it.
danShumway 8y ago
I would argue that there are efforts, many of them in radically different directions from AMP, and many of them already far more effective than AMP. Adblocking, for example, which several browsers now have built in and explicitly advertise it as a way to speed up pages and increase performance. Reader modes and Pocket will also take existing pages and re-serve them with cruft removed. Before HTTPS became the norm, Opera was offering turbo modes that allowed users to opt-into middleware rather than publishers. And along those lines, Opera Mini is still an incredibly popular mobile browser as soon as you leave the US. These are very different solutions from AMP, but that's the point. A diverse set of solutions to page bloat will look diverse. It won't just be 5 companies doing the same thing slightly differently. In regards to why there hasn't been broader success with the solution that most people default to, "just write better pages", that's because you need a carrot, and Google has that carrot -- preferential search placement. The original post dismissed the idea that people were only interested in AMP to get into search rankings, but I think it's a very strong argument. Obviously news sites are using AMP for reasons other than making their pages fast, or they would have made their pages fast before AMP came around. It is, pretty objectively, not hard to make a website that would be faster than most news sources. The problem has always been how to make publishers care. The fact that Google currently has the most power to dictate to publishers how they structure their content does not mean that Google's decisions on how to wield that power are always in the community's best interest. If you wanted to build an alternative standard to AMP built on the input of many different stakeholders, you would almost definitely need Google's help implementing it. That's not the same thing as saying that Google should decide on its own what that solution is. There is, finally, the kind of controversial answer to this question. I don't like this answer, but I don't dismiss it. It's that the broader web community may not actually care about web speed. I am very interested in finding ways to reduce page bloat -- but what if it turns out that most of the stakeholders online, most of the people who are actually building websites and visiting them, disagree that this is a significant problem? What if the solution to having slow webpages is literally just that users click away after a few seconds and go about their day? What if it's just that slow websites will gradually get less traffic, and if they don't care about that, then we shouldn't either? I'm skeptical of this answer, and I would be very unhappy if it turned out to be true. But I can't dismiss it entirely out of hand. In a large, diverse web, it is possible that there will occasionally be broad consensus that goes in the opposite direction of what Google or I want. And part of embracing that diversity is being at least a tiny bit open to the idea that the web is bigger than what I want it to be. But I don't think that's likely. I think the most likely answer is that publishers are embracing AMP to get search priority, and if Mozilla owned the world's largest search engine we probably would have a better version of AMP right now that took more people's input into account.

zzzcpan 8y ago

> (Discounting just telling people to write better pages which is basically just telling people to status quo harder) Well, AMP is just that, telling people to status quo harder, but with incentives from a monopoly (or rather abuse of power, forcing others to do that) and in a specific way said monopoly wants it.

danShumway 8y ago

I would argue that there are efforts, many of them in radically different directions from AMP, and many of them already far more effective than AMP. Adblocking, for example, which several browsers now have built in and explicitly advertise it as a way to speed up pages and increase performance. Reader modes and Pocket will also take existing pages and re-serve them with cruft removed. Before HTTPS became the norm, Opera was offering turbo modes that allowed users to opt-into middleware rather than publishers. And along those lines, Opera Mini is still an incredibly popular mobile browser as soon as you leave the US. These are very different solutions from AMP, but that's the point. A diverse set of solutions to page bloat will look diverse. It won't just be 5 companies doing the same thing slightly differently. In regards to why there hasn't been broader success with the solution that most people default to, "just write better pages", that's because you need a carrot, and Google has that carrot -- preferential search placement. The original post dismissed the idea that people were only interested in AMP to get into search rankings, but I think it's a very strong argument. Obviously news sites are using AMP for reasons other than making their pages fast, or they would have made their pages fast before AMP came around. It is, pretty objectively, not hard to make a website that would be faster than most news sources. The problem has always been how to make publishers care. The fact that Google currently has the most power to dictate to publishers how they structure their content does not mean that Google's decisions on how to wield that power are always in the community's best interest. If you wanted to build an alternative standard to AMP built on the input of many different stakeholders, you would almost definitely need Google's help implementing it. That's not the same thing as saying that Google should decide on its own what that solution is. There is, finally, the kind of controversial answer to this question. I don't like this answer, but I don't dismiss it. It's that the broader web community may not actually care about web speed. I am very interested in finding ways to reduce page bloat -- but what if it turns out that most of the stakeholders online, most of the people who are actually building websites and visiting them, disagree that this is a significant problem? What if the solution to having slow webpages is literally just that users click away after a few seconds and go about their day? What if it's just that slow websites will gradually get less traffic, and if they don't care about that, then we shouldn't either? I'm skeptical of this answer, and I would be very unhappy if it turned out to be true. But I can't dismiss it entirely out of hand. In a large, diverse web, it is possible that there will occasionally be broad consensus that goes in the opposite direction of what Google or I want. And part of embracing that diversity is being at least a tiny bit open to the idea that the web is bigger than what I want it to be. But I don't think that's likely. I think the most likely answer is that publishers are embracing AMP to get search priority, and if Mozilla owned the world's largest search engine we probably would have a better version of AMP right now that took more people's input into account.