19 ms·

Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it

519 points by luu 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmethvin 8y ago
AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's "nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably only use one or two.
- scoot_718 8y ago
  How is it working at Google? AMP breaks sites and makes it look like they're hosted elsewhere. It makes sites take multiple minutes to display after they redirect to the original version.
- matz1 8y ago
  Agree, I prefer to open amp site because most of time it simply load faster.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    I prefer to just use a content blocker to prevent the crap that slows down most sites from loading. Fun fact, blocking the amp JS makes amp pages artificially slow because they hide everything in css by default. AMP as a solution to slow websites is like a chainsaw as a solution to an itchy foot.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  Did you read the article (or even the headline)? Specifically the part about the site being faster before AMP?
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Impossible. For a site loaded from a SERP, the page will be preloaded if it is AMP. If you are creating an AMP page to be accessed directly (like the author), you fundamentally don't understand the problem that AMP solves and are using it wrong. PEBKAC.
    - untog 8y ago
      Which is in disagreement with the OP's statement: AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. AMP is more than that. AMP is the CDN that allows Google.com to preload your web page, and sits as an intermediary between you and your users.
      - lern_too_spel 8y ago
        It is a disagreement with OP's statement. Neither OP nor article author understand the problem that AMP solves. Also, AMP is not a CDN. A CDN is a component of an AMP preloading implementation.
      - dlp211 8y ago
        Anyone can run an AMP cache. Bing also serves AMP pages.
      - hexo 8y ago
        I dont want google to preload ANYTHING for me. Thanks.
    - robjan 8y ago
      If you go to the seminars held by Google, they suggest that in an ideal world your original pages would be AMP rather than having them separate.
- stephenr 8y ago
  AMP is google flexing its control over the web. If Google wanted to highlight fast/penalise slow sites, they could simply measure the load time of a site when they index it. But that would only achieve their stated goals, it wouldn’t achieve their actual goals.
  - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
    It feels like AMP is Google nailing its own coffin to me. It probably felt like a winning move when Bell and AT&T made people buy their own products to use telephone systems, but it led directly to their disruption by the DOJ. Even though some poeple at Google probably realize that, it won’t matter if they cash out beforehand, if working on a project gets them promoted, and if institutional inertia is in control. Google is hurtling toward an antitrust case they won’t win, and it will really be all their fault.
  - realusername 8y ago
    They could also just have mandated serving AMP with some random HTTP header and the client would cached a whitelist of the AMP scripts if got that header, nothing in the AMP design needs to have an AMP server, it's an arbitrary limitation from Google to control the web.
  - thrwwysearcheng 8y ago
    Throwaway Google search engineer here. People here really do care about making the web faster and moving metrics, both because that is how the company is set up to reward employees but also because they believe it makes the product better. Google has been penalizing slow sites forever. It stopped moving the needle (I suspect because it isn’t marketable). Amp on the other hand really is working, metrics show a faster, smoother experience, and user studies have been positive. That’s why Google is doubling down so much with it. Not because they have goals to control content providers or wall off the web, but because it makes a dramatic difference on the whole.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      So if the "only" goal of AMP is to make things faster, why isn't the carousel based purely on "your result must load in < X ms"? If a company can "force" other companies to adopt AMP, it can surely "force" them to improve load times on their own. Also, if speed is their goal, why does the mandatory AMP 'boilerplate' include a CSS-driven 8 second delay before content is shown, that is removed if the client loads the AMP JS? Oh right. I know the answer. It's to give the impression that blocking third-party resources (such as AMP JS) via e.g. a content blocker, won't make the site faster. Which as we know, is a load of shit. You might have the best of intentions and donate your entire salary to homeless blind children - that doesn't mean for a second that I believe google's actual goals with AMP are anything less than exerting more control over the web for their own purposes.
- manigandham 8y ago
  True, that's what the article says. It's about control over users and data, not performance or UX.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    It's about control of preloaded content, specifically. If you don't care about your content being easily preloaded from the SERP page, then sure, no need to use AMP. And if, as a user, you don't care about quick access to preloaded content (because e.g. you're on a low-latency connection), feel free to scroll down from the top-stories carousel.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Preloading is a waste of data on mobile. If you're on a metered connection then this costs more. Ranking sites by performance would already ensure a fast UX for users. Also position on the SERP page is a major indicator of relevancy. Biasing results because they use AMP is unfair and inaccurate.
- ClassyJacket 8y ago
  Sure, but one of those conventions and limitations is that the page is hosted by google. It's not something you can deploy on your own server. It's not as if it's just some list of recommendations that make sites faster - you're signing up to a Google service, and you're at their mercy from then on.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    >It's not something you can deploy on your own server. But you can. Often it doesn't matter because you aren't a globally distributed cache, but if you are cloudflare[1] (or apparently Microsoft[2]), you can and do. [1]: https://amp.cloudflare.com/ https://amp.cloudflare.com/ [2]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...
- whalabi 8y ago
  (author here) It's not just conventions and limitations. For example, you can't use an img tag on an AMP page. That's invalid AMP. You have to use an amp-img tag, which is rendered client side with js. Another example is with forms. It forces you to include the amp-form js. If it were just best practise, I'd be far happier to go along with it. Kind of the point here is that we were already using best practise, because the site was super fast.
  - hexo 8y ago
    Images rendered client side WITH JAVASCRIPT???? If my employee did AMP site for our company he'd immediately lose his job, no questions asked.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      This allows AMP to skip preloading images below the fold on viewports of arbitrary size. If you fired somebody for doing something you don't understand without asking for an explanation, that's your problem.
joegahona 8y ago
I'd love for Google to explain the justification for putting _only_ AMP content in the "Top Stories" carousel. Google needs to either rename the carousel to be "Top AMP stories" or allow non-AMP stories to appear in the carousel. Isn't the whole purpose of search to prioritize the most relevant content, regardless of the type of HTML used to create it?
- ben_jones 8y ago
  No the purpose of Google Search is to facilitate selling Ads.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  I'm not Google, but the reason is obvious to anyone who understands AMP. Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis, and a carousel lets the search results page figure out which pages to preload trivially (the results currently visible in the the carousel).
  - realusername 8y ago
    > Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis No, AMP pages can't be proven safe, because with AMP you can include ads which are a very common vector of malware.(if I understand your comment)
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      Ads aren't preloaded in AMP pages. Also, I don't think you understood my comment. I mean safe as in not deanonymizing the user to pages they don't visit. If you preload a non-AMP page, you have deanonymized your user to a third party publisher and the ad servers on that page.
      - realusername 8y ago
        > Ads aren't preloaded in AMP pages. That does not make a big difference. > Also, I don't think you understood my comment. I mean safe as in not deanonymizing the user to pages they don't visit. If you preload a non-AMP page, you have deanonymized your user to a third party publisher and the ad servers on that page. Sorry I still don't get it, with AMP it's exactly the same except that 3rd party is the Google AMP server. You can also load analytics & trackers with AMP as well. There's no privacy in the AMP design goals.
sergiotapia 8y ago
- Killing the web with AMP - Killing email with gmail specific garbage - Killing mobile phones with walled gardens - Killing browsers by implementing their own spec and fuck everybody else - Killing open source tools by releasing closed source extensions for VS Code Google has done a complete and total 180 in the past 10 years. I remember when the name inspired and made you feel safe that this thing you were using was made with character and thought to your well-being. Now it's a dry-heave feeling having to touch anything Google.
- stephenr 8y ago
  I don’t think they’ve done a 180, I just think we understand (through experience) their tactics better now.
  - incongruity 8y ago
    We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there. Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      They’ve been an advertising company since 2000, so I’d argue that yes it was there, people just didn’t recognise it/gave them the benefit of the doubt.
      - 0815test 8y ago
        Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.
        zu03776 8y ago
        While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s. AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_blocks_ads_cookies/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl... The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.
jrockway 8y ago
> For a start, anyone contributing to AMP is required to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) for their code to be accepted into the project This is pretty standard. You have to sign one to contribute to Emacs.
- rpdillon 8y ago
  I noticed this too, and immediately thought of the FSF. But I kept reading and thought this was different: > Note, you don’t grant these rights to the AMP Project, you grant them to Google. Google owns the code and patents.
  - vlovich123 8y ago
    This is standard. Copyrights are assigned to the body that owns the project. For EMACS this is FSF, for AMP this is Google. The only time it's something different is if a project is owned by a foundation just for that project but super common in the OSS world. Have you done much OSS development?
    - geggam 8y ago
      What license is AMP ... GPLV ? BSD ? MIT ?
      - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        AMP's license is technically Apache 2.0, but functionally, AMP's license is irrelevant. The only AMP code that matters is the code implemented on Google's servers for serving search results, as that is what everyone must comply with to be placed well on Google. Nothing about openness or transparency or governance of the project actually matters, because the issue is how AMP is used by Google on Google servers.
    - Wehrdo 8y ago
      Why don't projects let you sign away your copyright so your contribution becomes public domain? Is that even possible?
thethirdone 8y ago
> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit. I think for static articles 50kb should be plenty. The linked page itself uses only 35kb and a third of that is fontawesome. And 32kb of that is actually unused without javascript enabled. So the site only uses 3kb, but 50kb is absurdly small? This site (Hacker News) gets by with 2 kb.
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  Does this site run on AMP?
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    What in AMP would make HN need 50+ KB instead of 2 KB of CSS?
- ehsankia 8y ago
  The whole of jQuery minified is 30kb. Why you would ever need 50kb for a single AMP page is beyond me.
  - ars 8y ago
    It's mostly just long class names and things like that. If you minified the css along with the html you could get it significantly smaller. Also using individual css properties instead of combining them using the shorthand syntax, I assume any minifier would do that as well. Of course it's probably really hard to do because some class names are en/dis-abled in javascript and the names have to stay.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    There are no AMP pages that weigh less than 1MB. However, since Google aggressively preloads most of that data while you search, it gives you the illusion of AMP pages being lightweight. Non-AMP pages? Oh, Google will happily penalize them even if they perform better.
- 8y ago
xiphias2 8y ago
,,50kb is an absurdly small.... responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.)'' Why would I need CSS for iPhone? I don't have an iPhone. Also I'm now browsing from my laptop, so I don't need mobile specific CSS either. Isn't there a way for the responsive site to load CSS specific to the device/display?
- untog 8y ago
  No. Especially not with AMP, because Google sits between you and your user so you never get to know what device they are using. In theory on your own site you could use user agent sniffing to worn out what CSS to send, but it's still not a great idea because you'll be wrong at least some of the time.
  - 33degrees 8y ago
    User agent sniffing is how we ended up with things like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36"
    - sgjohnson 8y ago
      Hey, you weren't kidding. Mine is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1 Safari/605.1.15
  - rolph 8y ago
    "you'll be wrong at least some of the time." I think the adoption rate for UserAgentSpoofers, could be a related metric, approximating the value of "some of the time" my user agent rotates randomly, or when the spoofer button is clicked
- BenMorganIO 8y ago
  You can sort of, but you'd need your own server. Google has control over this and I'm not sure if they permit different content for each device. They probably don't.
pagespeedisb 8y ago
One point here: stop using Google Pagespeed Scores unless you're having serious speed issues that need correcting. Google only uses this in an incredibly small way, yet I've seen SEO people at multiple companies hammering on it like it's some magical SEO juicer. It's not. Just don't be in the bottom 10% (Google uses a slice even smaller than 10%). I like that Google wants the web to be faster, but if I could axe one product that causes a lot of angst, it's that damn pagespeed score.
geggam 8y ago
Soon enough Google will face the fate of Ma Bell
- giobox 8y ago
  Not so sure. We live in a very different time, and appetites for breaking up very large companies with dominant market positions in the US seemed to die with the Clinton administration’s failed attempt on Microsoft.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It's not just appetites. The laws themselves have been reinterpreted, and the AT&T breakup happened right as it was going on - it might have not happened 10 years later. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-borks-america/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork...
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Be split up only to later recombine into a larger entity?
  - geggam 8y ago
    Not sure, I cant get a feel for society as a whole. If the apathy is actually gone or its just those pockets of "I want to be angry" still kicking
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    ...at tremendous profit to executives and bankers. All of the resources that various investors sank into building "competing" infrastructure, consumed through strong-armed acquisitions as everyone slowly realized that FCC was just as opposed to competition as they always have been.
- ronnier 8y ago
  Times have changed. It’ll never happen as it creates risks of a Chinese competitor taking hold, and the US government doesn’t want that.
joering2 8y ago
Until Google will allow me to block whole swaths of IPs in effort to lower spam getting into my Inbox, I don't care much about other upgrades. For few months now it seems to me that Sparkpost is a favorite choice of spammers. Perhaps its the low cost or maybe its because they never ever answered to a single spam@sparkpost.com email I send forwarding abusers content. None, zero nada! I can report someone... silence... an then 3 days new letter pops up from a new domain (but same IP) from Sparkpost. That's why I need to be able to block whole IPs.
kristianp 8y ago
This link on the page is dead (404): https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page-web https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-creating-the-o... Edit, apparently it should be linked from here, as the title and url of the article has changed: http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page-web http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page...
- whalabi 8y ago
  Thanks! Fixed :)
kristianp 8y ago
Practically, they probably weren't faster than their AMP page on mobile as a search result, because of preloading and google CDNage of the AMP cache of the page.
- acdha 8y ago
  That’s the sales pitch but I usually notice AMP pages because they take so long to render at all, waiting for a ton of JavaScript to load before anything displays. Mobile caches are small and unless you hit Google a lot in the same browser you see those delays frequently compared to sites which follow other Google teams’ recommendations for performance.
ronlobo 8y ago
I am wondering when the EU is finally giving this BS a fine.
taytus 8y ago
Hi, full disclosure I'm the founder of a company providing AMP services. You can hate and have valid arguments against AMP, but... on this article, in particular, where is the data? How can people comment and form an opinion based on basically nothing? Am I missing the "before and after" links with the benchmarks?
- whalabi 8y ago
  (Author here) You can run the test yourself on the AMP and non-AMP versions of an identical article to see yourself. (Note: sometimes the numbers are off the first couple of times you run tests. If you run them multiple times, the AMP articles tend to score (sometimes significantly) lower.) Non-AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh) AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi) Edit: More data here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846
  - taytus 8y ago
    The AMP version gives me better results: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.37.39.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-... Non AMP version:https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.40.12.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-... My email is on my profile if you want to talk about this. Maybe we can help. Edit: If you compare against the cached version, the version that your mobile users are going to hit, the results are much much better: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.44.23.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - whalabi 8y ago
auslander 8y ago
Google today is a single gateway where business go to sell and users go to do anything. Its a monopoly power. Nothing will change until there are better alternatives. Binq is big but stupid. DDG is too small. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, CDNs should all create good search engines, and allow SE aggregators to live.
seanwilson 8y ago
> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit. Stylesheets these days handle resets for normalising behaviour between browsers, grid systems so you can lay things out without resorting to murder-suicide, and responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.) These essential components will take you a decent way to to the 50kb already. As far as I know, the 50KB limit is per page. I can't see why a typical single page should require that much CSS where the CSS included is actively used on that page. If you're going to include e.g. the CSS for every Bootstrap component on every page you're easily going to go over the limit but the whole point of the limit is to discourage you from doing that. The OP article should only require a modest amount of CSS I think, same for most pages. People here hate on AMP a lot, but "avoid excessive CSS" is a good guideline in my opinion.
mtaksrud 8y ago
Google needs to be split up and shut down. Why aren’t the American authorities using the antitrust laws that is already there?
- cdransf 8y ago
  Because Republicans are in power and they know no greater god than corporate power and the almighty dollar.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I’m not defending Republicans but as someone else said American anti trust law has always been about protecting consumers and not businesses. Unfortunately, everything I could site about the difference comes from Ben Thompson’s (of stratechery fame) Exponent Podcast.
    - kevinh 8y ago
      The current interpretation of antitrust law in the United States is fairly new (it's only been around for 50 years or so, and as I understand it, largely driven by The Antitrust Paradox by Robert Bork [yes, that Bork]). Before that, there was broader enforcement in the antitrust sphere.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Of course there is a Planet Money episode about that.... https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=696337392 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
- sfifs 8y ago
  Basically because the current philosophy of the US justice department anti trust prosecutions is whether market dominance of the player harms ordinary people or causes them to incur higher cost. It is not really about actual monopoly power. Google has been pretty careful to stay consistent with this philosophy. This wasn't always so in the US and it's not the same philosophy in EU. However, it is a valid and consistent view.
tflinton 8y ago
Why on earth do we look to this bizarre for technical capability?
Romanulus 8y ago
Thus far, this whole AMP business seems like Google's tech-tipped thrust to control information (apart from their other methods thus far).
- lllr_finger 8y ago
  It's definitely control, but it's almost a lesser of three evils - it's no coincidence that as a large web publisher at the time, we were approached by Google, Facebook, and Apple at almost the same time and asked to deliver content for their respective walled gardens. I'd happily choose the web over the other two alternatives. Sure it'd be great to have an open standard achieving the same thing as AMP, but it's 2019 and we haven't seen it yet.
  - Romanulus 8y ago
    I just think they are going about it in a pushy yet guarded way. I'd prefer good architects over good architecture as it breeds creativity/variety
pcarolan 8y ago
Google isn’t the web. To make the point that they’re dictating web standards is like saying that walmart makes people sick by only placing unhealthy products on their end caps. Like it or not, it is Google’s store and if you don’t like it, sell your wares in the Whole Foods down the street (duck duck go) or find a more creative channel than SEO (Instagram, podcasts, Twitter, etc).
- taurath 8y ago
  Google isn’t the web like the banking system isn’t the only way to move money - you can do it, but it’s really really difficult and if you have business ambitions it’s almost certainly the wrong choice to avoid it.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I don’t think Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) spends too much time worrying about SEO and Google. He built a solid reputation with excellent idea and he did this strange model of getting people to pay money for stuff - over 3000 people to pay him $100 a year to read his content.
- emerongi 8y ago
  google.com is 100% the most powerful, influential site existing by a wide margin. Can you say that about Whole Foods or Walmart? No, they're just another shop in town. Google IS the web.
headsoup 8y ago
I think the most fundamental issue here is that organisations are rebuilding their websites with AMP to align to Google search, when Google search is not the only search product available (much as you could believe otherwise from the discussion!). How did all the work this company did add any value for someone using DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia, etc considering the site was already fast? This type of activity is a bad outcome.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Bing also preloads AMP pages, so this work would add value for Bing users. https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu... Same with Baidu. https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-expansion-yahoo-japan-baidu-china/ https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-e...
amgin3 8y ago
AMP has totally ruined the internet for desktop users. ~90% of AMP sites don't even provide a link to the full desktop version of the page (unless you want to dig through the source code of the page, but even then it is hit and miss), and AMP sites are linked to more and more on social media sites like reddit.
kevmo 8y ago
Google/Alphabet needs to be broken up.
Causality1 8y ago
Why the hell does AMP and AMP alone get the privilege of hijacking chrome mobile's menu bar and hiding it from the user until we scroll all the way up to the top of the page and then drag it back down? It's like they've never heard of tabbed browsing before.
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  "Why the hell use Chrome?" : a corollary, no?
  - Causality1 8y ago
    Good tab management, to be honest. Other mobile browsers like Firefox and the Adblock browser have issues where swiping the tab away only works in a specific direction or in a very straight line, or is annoyingly difficult when the device is in landscape mode because you have to swipe twice as far for some reason, or the UI for opening the tabs page is inconvenient.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Anybody can do it. You better have a good reason though. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardware/fullscreen/ https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardwa...
gdsdfe 8y ago
I think breaking Google's monopoly over search is the biggest challenge that nobody is trying to solve ... Maybe nobody's knows how to, maybe nobody's willing to invest in such endeavor but I hope people will realize soon that the cost of doing nothing is becoming much higher than the cost of trying ... And yeah I know there's duckduckgo but we need at least 2 or 3 much better duckduckgo's
dagenix 8y ago
This article would be much more interesting if they showed that the AMP version of the page actually was slower than the non-AMP version. Instead, they just say that Google's Page Speed score is lower for the AMP version. But _nobody_ cares about the Page Speed score - it's just a rough proxy for user experience. The author of the article, however, doesn't do anything to look at actual user experience.
0xfaded 8y ago
The irony is that the web version of google news on mobile is horrendously slow. Hackernews seems to have good performance though, maybe they can take some design cues.
ww520 8y ago
Microsoft was sued by DOJ by bundling IE with the OS. Google is doing a similar thing with AMP. They are walking a fine line.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  you don't HAVE to use google search. everyone just prefers it. people prefer bing for searching videos(less censorship) and duck duck go for more organic results. i don't think the AMP carousel is anything but a feature. people need to stop treating companies as services. products can go away in the blink of an eye.
  - Un1corn 8y ago
    You never HAD to use Windows
  - cyborgx7 8y ago
    Why is there constant advocacy to do away with anti-trust laws on this website?
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      how is it violating anti-trust is what i want to know. you don't put your website on google amp so google ranks you lower - they've told you this upfront. if you don't like google amp you can choose to not support it and take the advertising/SEO hit(which is really a monetary hit) except no, people say they are "forced" to use google amp. well duh, google was also "forced" to make amp due to the shitty way people design websites in general(slow, ads in awkward places leading people to install ad blockers etc etc) amp is inevitable in my opinion - the old style of ads are intolerable to most users now and google needs to keep up since ads are their core business
      - cyborgx7 8y ago
        using your monopoly to force another one of your products on people violates anti-trust law that's how
hexo 8y ago
so, kill google news. who cares about it anyway and if anyone do I just don't get why. google platform stinks more than anything ever microsoft did
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Google News is a very useful tool for a lot of people trying to find coverage from sources other than the select few that they might often frequent. I use it to find how international articles affect my country, my area, etc. I also use it to find articles in other languages. Aside from that, Google News content is heavily integrated into the normal Google Search pages. It's not simply a matter of simply ignoring it; Google makes their Google News results some of the top results for searches for current events.
  - hexo 8y ago
    Yes it certainly is matter of ignoring it. Only not ignoring that stuff gives it credibility as we gave microsoft products.
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      If you think the majority of people are going to ignore what Google posts as the most relevant search result, I don’t think there’s anything more I can say to dissuade you.
jocoda 8y ago
From the article: >... the position on Google’s results that can literally mean the difference between a failed business and one that makes millions of dollars looks to me like your business is the tail, and here you are trying to wag the dog.
xyzal 8y ago
A reminder to all AMP-haters like me: When using Firefox mobile, Google search results become free of AMP crap. Also, you get the added benefit of a browser whose maker has no interest in tracking your every move.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  And it has extensions like desktop browsers do, including ones that remove even more modern website bloat
  - gourou 8y ago
    You mean built-in extensions or can you add some now?
    - oarfish 8y ago
      This has been possible for as long as I'm using it on Android. Ability to run uBlock is great.
    - matoro 8y ago
      You have always been able to use every desktop extension on mobile FF, at least as long as I have been using it.
      - asdff 8y ago
        Android or iOS?
        Max_Mustermann 8y ago
        Android. iOS's firefox is Safari (like every browser on the iPhone) with a firefox overlay.
0x54D5 8y ago
I'm starting to despise Google the same way I despise Fox News. You an argue with me on the internet about it all you like but these days if an ex Google employee's resume lands in front of me I steer clear.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
All good points. But not sure why "unlike kinds" should actually be featured - lets be honest your not exactly a household name in publishing. Its hard enough getting a major publishing brand accepted by google as a news publisher.
pizzamoney 8y ago
Why in the earth you would use Google s sandbox es ?
dcbadacd 8y ago
People say AMP is disgusting, but I say that the alternative is even worse. Just go visit delfi.ee, postimees.ee, õhtuleht.ee and you'll see how damn bloated sites become if there's no market pressure to leanness.
- patentatt 8y ago
  For any other uninformed readers of this comment: .ee is the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Estonia, operated by the Estonian Internet Foundation. (I had to look it up too)
- acdha 8y ago
  This is true but consider an alternate history where Google cared more about web performance than pushing sites to adopt their proprietary JavaScript toolkit: search rankings would simply incorporate page performance/size measured in real browsers and all of those sites would have a strong incentive to reduce page weight and they could load faster without needing 100KB of AMP JavaScript to successfully load before they start rendering.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    I'd be glad if that alternate history were the case, but currently AMP seems to be the lesser evil. AMP doesn't make my laptop's fans spin up.
    - acdha 8y ago
      I use Firefox’s content blocking and haven’t had that happen in years except on new installs where I forgot to disable WebM.
      - dcbadacd 8y ago
        I don't use Firefox because my hardware is super weak and hardware acceleration is a must for most things for me - FF doesn't do that.
crazygringo 8y ago
Can someone explain how an AMP page would possibly be slower? Especially given Google's CDN and the fact it's likely to be preloaded in practice? I find myself wondering if this isn't just some artifact of the Chrome tool being used to measure performance -- especially since that tool reports an overall score like "94", not an actual speed -- and the weightings it uses [1] could be different from what AMP is designed specifically to speed up. Also it would have to be measured across a wide variety of locations worldwide, etc., certainly if the author's webserver is in their own city, for example. A lot more data, measured rigorously, would be needed to prove that AMP is actually slower in practice -- it's a bold claim. [1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring
- lllr_finger 8y ago
  Unless things have changed, you can't think of it as a real CDN. The Google engineer assigned to our AMP launch told us to think of it as a proxy without actually calling it that. Our testing showed that to be an accurate description of how it worked in practice.
cphoover 8y ago
Google AMP needs to die...
JohnFen 8y ago
I personally have a choice about AMP pages -- I ignore them. AMP blows, and if I can't get a non-AMP version of a page, that page doesn't exist for me.

519 points by luu 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's "nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably only use one or two.

scoot_718 8y ago
How is it working at Google? AMP breaks sites and makes it look like they're hosted elsewhere. It makes sites take multiple minutes to display after they redirect to the original version.
matz1 8y ago
Agree, I prefer to open amp site because most of time it simply load faster.
- stephenr 8y ago
  I prefer to just use a content blocker to prevent the crap that slows down most sites from loading. Fun fact, blocking the amp JS makes amp pages artificially slow because they hide everything in css by default. AMP as a solution to slow websites is like a chainsaw as a solution to an itchy foot.
AlexandrB 8y ago
Did you read the article (or even the headline)? Specifically the part about the site being faster before AMP?
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Impossible. For a site loaded from a SERP, the page will be preloaded if it is AMP. If you are creating an AMP page to be accessed directly (like the author), you fundamentally don't understand the problem that AMP solves and are using it wrong. PEBKAC.
  - untog 8y ago
    Which is in disagreement with the OP's statement: AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. AMP is more than that. AMP is the CDN that allows Google.com to preload your web page, and sits as an intermediary between you and your users.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      It is a disagreement with OP's statement. Neither OP nor article author understand the problem that AMP solves. Also, AMP is not a CDN. A CDN is a component of an AMP preloading implementation.
    - dlp211 8y ago
      Anyone can run an AMP cache. Bing also serves AMP pages.
    - hexo 8y ago
      I dont want google to preload ANYTHING for me. Thanks.
  - robjan 8y ago
    If you go to the seminars held by Google, they suggest that in an ideal world your original pages would be AMP rather than having them separate.
stephenr 8y ago
AMP is google flexing its control over the web. If Google wanted to highlight fast/penalise slow sites, they could simply measure the load time of a site when they index it. But that would only achieve their stated goals, it wouldn’t achieve their actual goals.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  It feels like AMP is Google nailing its own coffin to me. It probably felt like a winning move when Bell and AT&T made people buy their own products to use telephone systems, but it led directly to their disruption by the DOJ. Even though some poeple at Google probably realize that, it won’t matter if they cash out beforehand, if working on a project gets them promoted, and if institutional inertia is in control. Google is hurtling toward an antitrust case they won’t win, and it will really be all their fault.
- realusername 8y ago
  They could also just have mandated serving AMP with some random HTTP header and the client would cached a whitelist of the AMP scripts if got that header, nothing in the AMP design needs to have an AMP server, it's an arbitrary limitation from Google to control the web.
- thrwwysearcheng 8y ago
  Throwaway Google search engineer here. People here really do care about making the web faster and moving metrics, both because that is how the company is set up to reward employees but also because they believe it makes the product better. Google has been penalizing slow sites forever. It stopped moving the needle (I suspect because it isn’t marketable). Amp on the other hand really is working, metrics show a faster, smoother experience, and user studies have been positive. That’s why Google is doubling down so much with it. Not because they have goals to control content providers or wall off the web, but because it makes a dramatic difference on the whole.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    So if the "only" goal of AMP is to make things faster, why isn't the carousel based purely on "your result must load in < X ms"? If a company can "force" other companies to adopt AMP, it can surely "force" them to improve load times on their own. Also, if speed is their goal, why does the mandatory AMP 'boilerplate' include a CSS-driven 8 second delay before content is shown, that is removed if the client loads the AMP JS? Oh right. I know the answer. It's to give the impression that blocking third-party resources (such as AMP JS) via e.g. a content blocker, won't make the site faster. Which as we know, is a load of shit. You might have the best of intentions and donate your entire salary to homeless blind children - that doesn't mean for a second that I believe google's actual goals with AMP are anything less than exerting more control over the web for their own purposes.
manigandham 8y ago
True, that's what the article says. It's about control over users and data, not performance or UX.
- 0815test 8y ago
  It's about control of preloaded content, specifically. If you don't care about your content being easily preloaded from the SERP page, then sure, no need to use AMP. And if, as a user, you don't care about quick access to preloaded content (because e.g. you're on a low-latency connection), feel free to scroll down from the top-stories carousel.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Preloading is a waste of data on mobile. If you're on a metered connection then this costs more. Ranking sites by performance would already ensure a fast UX for users. Also position on the SERP page is a major indicator of relevancy. Biasing results because they use AMP is unfair and inaccurate.
ClassyJacket 8y ago
Sure, but one of those conventions and limitations is that the page is hosted by google. It's not something you can deploy on your own server. It's not as if it's just some list of recommendations that make sites faster - you're signing up to a Google service, and you're at their mercy from then on.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  >It's not something you can deploy on your own server. But you can. Often it doesn't matter because you aren't a globally distributed cache, but if you are cloudflare[1] (or apparently Microsoft[2]), you can and do. [1]: https://amp.cloudflare.com/ https://amp.cloudflare.com/ [2]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...
whalabi 8y ago
(author here) It's not just conventions and limitations. For example, you can't use an img tag on an AMP page. That's invalid AMP. You have to use an amp-img tag, which is rendered client side with js. Another example is with forms. It forces you to include the amp-form js. If it were just best practise, I'd be far happier to go along with it. Kind of the point here is that we were already using best practise, because the site was super fast.
- hexo 8y ago
  Images rendered client side WITH JAVASCRIPT???? If my employee did AMP site for our company he'd immediately lose his job, no questions asked.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    This allows AMP to skip preloading images below the fold on viewports of arbitrary size. If you fired somebody for doing something you don't understand without asking for an explanation, that's your problem.

joegahona 8y ago

I'd love for Google to explain the justification for putting _only_ AMP content in the "Top Stories" carousel. Google needs to either rename the carousel to be "Top AMP stories" or allow non-AMP stories to appear in the carousel. Isn't the whole purpose of search to prioritize the most relevant content, regardless of the type of HTML used to create it?

ben_jones 8y ago
No the purpose of Google Search is to facilitate selling Ads.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
I'm not Google, but the reason is obvious to anyone who understands AMP. Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis, and a carousel lets the search results page figure out which pages to preload trivially (the results currently visible in the the carousel).
- realusername 8y ago
  > Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis No, AMP pages can't be proven safe, because with AMP you can include ads which are a very common vector of malware.(if I understand your comment)
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Ads aren't preloaded in AMP pages. Also, I don't think you understood my comment. I mean safe as in not deanonymizing the user to pages they don't visit. If you preload a non-AMP page, you have deanonymized your user to a third party publisher and the ad servers on that page.
    - realusername 8y ago
      > Ads aren't preloaded in AMP pages. That does not make a big difference. > Also, I don't think you understood my comment. I mean safe as in not deanonymizing the user to pages they don't visit. If you preload a non-AMP page, you have deanonymized your user to a third party publisher and the ad servers on that page. Sorry I still don't get it, with AMP it's exactly the same except that 3rd party is the Google AMP server. You can also load analytics & trackers with AMP as well. There's no privacy in the AMP design goals.

sergiotapia 8y ago

- Killing the web with AMP - Killing email with gmail specific garbage - Killing mobile phones with walled gardens - Killing browsers by implementing their own spec and fuck everybody else - Killing open source tools by releasing closed source extensions for VS Code Google has done a complete and total 180 in the past 10 years. I remember when the name inspired and made you feel safe that this thing you were using was made with character and thought to your well-being. Now it's a dry-heave feeling having to touch anything Google.

stephenr 8y ago
I don’t think they’ve done a 180, I just think we understand (through experience) their tactics better now.
- incongruity 8y ago
  We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there. Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    They’ve been an advertising company since 2000, so I’d argue that yes it was there, people just didn’t recognise it/gave them the benefit of the doubt.
    - 0815test 8y ago
      Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.
      - zu03776 8y ago
        While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s. AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_blocks_ads_cookies/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl... The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.

jrockway 8y ago

> For a start, anyone contributing to AMP is required to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) for their code to be accepted into the project This is pretty standard. You have to sign one to contribute to Emacs.

rpdillon 8y ago
I noticed this too, and immediately thought of the FSF. But I kept reading and thought this was different: > Note, you don’t grant these rights to the AMP Project, you grant them to Google. Google owns the code and patents.
- vlovich123 8y ago
  This is standard. Copyrights are assigned to the body that owns the project. For EMACS this is FSF, for AMP this is Google. The only time it's something different is if a project is owned by a foundation just for that project but super common in the OSS world. Have you done much OSS development?
  - geggam 8y ago
    What license is AMP ... GPLV ? BSD ? MIT ?
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      AMP's license is technically Apache 2.0, but functionally, AMP's license is irrelevant. The only AMP code that matters is the code implemented on Google's servers for serving search results, as that is what everyone must comply with to be placed well on Google. Nothing about openness or transparency or governance of the project actually matters, because the issue is how AMP is used by Google on Google servers.
  - Wehrdo 8y ago
    Why don't projects let you sign away your copyright so your contribution becomes public domain? Is that even possible?

thethirdone 8y ago

> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit. I think for static articles 50kb should be plenty. The linked page itself uses only 35kb and a third of that is fontawesome. And 32kb of that is actually unused without javascript enabled. So the site only uses 3kb, but 50kb is absurdly small? This site (Hacker News) gets by with 2 kb.

Fjolsvith 8y ago
Does this site run on AMP?
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  What in AMP would make HN need 50+ KB instead of 2 KB of CSS?
ehsankia 8y ago
The whole of jQuery minified is 30kb. Why you would ever need 50kb for a single AMP page is beyond me.
- ars 8y ago
  It's mostly just long class names and things like that. If you minified the css along with the html you could get it significantly smaller. Also using individual css properties instead of combining them using the shorthand syntax, I assume any minifier would do that as well. Of course it's probably really hard to do because some class names are en/dis-abled in javascript and the names have to stay.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  There are no AMP pages that weigh less than 1MB. However, since Google aggressively preloads most of that data while you search, it gives you the illusion of AMP pages being lightweight. Non-AMP pages? Oh, Google will happily penalize them even if they perform better.
8y ago

xiphias2 8y ago

,,50kb is an absurdly small.... responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.)'' Why would I need CSS for iPhone? I don't have an iPhone. Also I'm now browsing from my laptop, so I don't need mobile specific CSS either. Isn't there a way for the responsive site to load CSS specific to the device/display?

untog 8y ago
No. Especially not with AMP, because Google sits between you and your user so you never get to know what device they are using. In theory on your own site you could use user agent sniffing to worn out what CSS to send, but it's still not a great idea because you'll be wrong at least some of the time.
- 33degrees 8y ago
  User agent sniffing is how we ended up with things like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36"
  - sgjohnson 8y ago
    Hey, you weren't kidding. Mine is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1 Safari/605.1.15
- rolph 8y ago
  "you'll be wrong at least some of the time." I think the adoption rate for UserAgentSpoofers, could be a related metric, approximating the value of "some of the time" my user agent rotates randomly, or when the spoofer button is clicked
BenMorganIO 8y ago
You can sort of, but you'd need your own server. Google has control over this and I'm not sure if they permit different content for each device. They probably don't.

pagespeedisb 8y ago

One point here: stop using Google Pagespeed Scores unless you're having serious speed issues that need correcting. Google only uses this in an incredibly small way, yet I've seen SEO people at multiple companies hammering on it like it's some magical SEO juicer. It's not. Just don't be in the bottom 10% (Google uses a slice even smaller than 10%). I like that Google wants the web to be faster, but if I could axe one product that causes a lot of angst, it's that damn pagespeed score.

geggam 8y ago

Soon enough Google will face the fate of Ma Bell

giobox 8y ago
Not so sure. We live in a very different time, and appetites for breaking up very large companies with dominant market positions in the US seemed to die with the Clinton administration’s failed attempt on Microsoft.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It's not just appetites. The laws themselves have been reinterpreted, and the AT&T breakup happened right as it was going on - it might have not happened 10 years later. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-borks-america/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork...
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Be split up only to later recombine into a larger entity?
- geggam 8y ago
  Not sure, I cant get a feel for society as a whole. If the apathy is actually gone or its just those pockets of "I want to be angry" still kicking
- jessaustin 8y ago
  ...at tremendous profit to executives and bankers. All of the resources that various investors sank into building "competing" infrastructure, consumed through strong-armed acquisitions as everyone slowly realized that FCC was just as opposed to competition as they always have been.
ronnier 8y ago
Times have changed. It’ll never happen as it creates risks of a Chinese competitor taking hold, and the US government doesn’t want that.

joering2 8y ago

Until Google will allow me to block whole swaths of IPs in effort to lower spam getting into my Inbox, I don't care much about other upgrades. For few months now it seems to me that Sparkpost is a favorite choice of spammers. Perhaps its the low cost or maybe its because they never ever answered to a single spam@sparkpost.com email I send forwarding abusers content. None, zero nada! I can report someone... silence... an then 3 days new letter pops up from a new domain (but same IP) from Sparkpost. That's why I need to be able to block whole IPs.

kristianp 8y ago

This link on the page is dead (404): https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page-web https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-creating-the-o... Edit, apparently it should be linked from here, as the title and url of the article has changed: http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page-web http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page...

whalabi 8y ago
Thanks! Fixed :)

kristianp 8y ago

Practically, they probably weren't faster than their AMP page on mobile as a search result, because of preloading and google CDNage of the AMP cache of the page.

acdha 8y ago
That’s the sales pitch but I usually notice AMP pages because they take so long to render at all, waiting for a ton of JavaScript to load before anything displays. Mobile caches are small and unless you hit Google a lot in the same browser you see those delays frequently compared to sites which follow other Google teams’ recommendations for performance.

ronlobo 8y ago

I am wondering when the EU is finally giving this BS a fine.

taytus 8y ago

Hi, full disclosure I'm the founder of a company providing AMP services. You can hate and have valid arguments against AMP, but... on this article, in particular, where is the data? How can people comment and form an opinion based on basically nothing? Am I missing the "before and after" links with the benchmarks?

whalabi 8y ago
(Author here) You can run the test yourself on the AMP and non-AMP versions of an identical article to see yourself. (Note: sometimes the numbers are off the first couple of times you run tests. If you run them multiple times, the AMP articles tend to score (sometimes significantly) lower.) Non-AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh) AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi) Edit: More data here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846
- taytus 8y ago
  The AMP version gives me better results: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.37.39.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-... Non AMP version:https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.40.12.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-... My email is on my profile if you want to talk about this. Maybe we can help. Edit: If you compare against the cached version, the version that your mobile users are going to hit, the results are much much better: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.44.23.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - whalabi 8y ago

auslander 8y ago

Google today is a single gateway where business go to sell and users go to do anything. Its a monopoly power. Nothing will change until there are better alternatives. Binq is big but stupid. DDG is too small. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, CDNs should all create good search engines, and allow SE aggregators to live.

seanwilson 8y ago

> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit. Stylesheets these days handle resets for normalising behaviour between browsers, grid systems so you can lay things out without resorting to murder-suicide, and responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.) These essential components will take you a decent way to to the 50kb already. As far as I know, the 50KB limit is per page. I can't see why a typical single page should require that much CSS where the CSS included is actively used on that page. If you're going to include e.g. the CSS for every Bootstrap component on every page you're easily going to go over the limit but the whole point of the limit is to discourage you from doing that. The OP article should only require a modest amount of CSS I think, same for most pages. People here hate on AMP a lot, but "avoid excessive CSS" is a good guideline in my opinion.

mtaksrud 8y ago

Google needs to be split up and shut down. Why aren’t the American authorities using the antitrust laws that is already there?

cdransf 8y ago
Because Republicans are in power and they know no greater god than corporate power and the almighty dollar.
- scarface74 8y ago
  I’m not defending Republicans but as someone else said American anti trust law has always been about protecting consumers and not businesses. Unfortunately, everything I could site about the difference comes from Ben Thompson’s (of stratechery fame) Exponent Podcast.
  - kevinh 8y ago
    The current interpretation of antitrust law in the United States is fairly new (it's only been around for 50 years or so, and as I understand it, largely driven by The Antitrust Paradox by Robert Bork [yes, that Bork]). Before that, there was broader enforcement in the antitrust sphere.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Of course there is a Planet Money episode about that.... https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=696337392 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
sfifs 8y ago
Basically because the current philosophy of the US justice department anti trust prosecutions is whether market dominance of the player harms ordinary people or causes them to incur higher cost. It is not really about actual monopoly power. Google has been pretty careful to stay consistent with this philosophy. This wasn't always so in the US and it's not the same philosophy in EU. However, it is a valid and consistent view.

tflinton 8y ago

Why on earth do we look to this bizarre for technical capability?

Romanulus 8y ago

Thus far, this whole AMP business seems like Google's tech-tipped thrust to control information (apart from their other methods thus far).

lllr_finger 8y ago
It's definitely control, but it's almost a lesser of three evils - it's no coincidence that as a large web publisher at the time, we were approached by Google, Facebook, and Apple at almost the same time and asked to deliver content for their respective walled gardens. I'd happily choose the web over the other two alternatives. Sure it'd be great to have an open standard achieving the same thing as AMP, but it's 2019 and we haven't seen it yet.
- Romanulus 8y ago
  I just think they are going about it in a pushy yet guarded way. I'd prefer good architects over good architecture as it breeds creativity/variety

pcarolan 8y ago

Google isn’t the web. To make the point that they’re dictating web standards is like saying that walmart makes people sick by only placing unhealthy products on their end caps. Like it or not, it is Google’s store and if you don’t like it, sell your wares in the Whole Foods down the street (duck duck go) or find a more creative channel than SEO (Instagram, podcasts, Twitter, etc).

taurath 8y ago
Google isn’t the web like the banking system isn’t the only way to move money - you can do it, but it’s really really difficult and if you have business ambitions it’s almost certainly the wrong choice to avoid it.
- scarface74 8y ago
  I don’t think Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) spends too much time worrying about SEO and Google. He built a solid reputation with excellent idea and he did this strange model of getting people to pay money for stuff - over 3000 people to pay him $100 a year to read his content.
emerongi 8y ago
google.com is 100% the most powerful, influential site existing by a wide margin. Can you say that about Whole Foods or Walmart? No, they're just another shop in town. Google IS the web.

headsoup 8y ago

I think the most fundamental issue here is that organisations are rebuilding their websites with AMP to align to Google search, when Google search is not the only search product available (much as you could believe otherwise from the discussion!). How did all the work this company did add any value for someone using DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia, etc considering the site was already fast? This type of activity is a bad outcome.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Bing also preloads AMP pages, so this work would add value for Bing users. https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu... Same with Baidu. https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-expansion-yahoo-japan-baidu-china/ https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-e...

amgin3 8y ago

AMP has totally ruined the internet for desktop users. ~90% of AMP sites don't even provide a link to the full desktop version of the page (unless you want to dig through the source code of the page, but even then it is hit and miss), and AMP sites are linked to more and more on social media sites like reddit.

kevmo 8y ago

Google/Alphabet needs to be broken up.

Causality1 8y ago

Why the hell does AMP and AMP alone get the privilege of hijacking chrome mobile's menu bar and hiding it from the user until we scroll all the way up to the top of the page and then drag it back down? It's like they've never heard of tabbed browsing before.

jjtheblunt 8y ago
"Why the hell use Chrome?" : a corollary, no?
- Causality1 8y ago
  Good tab management, to be honest. Other mobile browsers like Firefox and the Adblock browser have issues where swiping the tab away only works in a specific direction or in a very straight line, or is annoyingly difficult when the device is in landscape mode because you have to swipe twice as far for some reason, or the UI for opening the tabs page is inconvenient.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Anybody can do it. You better have a good reason though. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardware/fullscreen/ https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardwa...

gdsdfe 8y ago

I think breaking Google's monopoly over search is the biggest challenge that nobody is trying to solve ... Maybe nobody's knows how to, maybe nobody's willing to invest in such endeavor but I hope people will realize soon that the cost of doing nothing is becoming much higher than the cost of trying ... And yeah I know there's duckduckgo but we need at least 2 or 3 much better duckduckgo's

dagenix 8y ago

This article would be much more interesting if they showed that the AMP version of the page actually was slower than the non-AMP version. Instead, they just say that Google's Page Speed score is lower for the AMP version. But _nobody_ cares about the Page Speed score - it's just a rough proxy for user experience. The author of the article, however, doesn't do anything to look at actual user experience.

0xfaded 8y ago

The irony is that the web version of google news on mobile is horrendously slow. Hackernews seems to have good performance though, maybe they can take some design cues.

ww520 8y ago

Microsoft was sued by DOJ by bundling IE with the OS. Google is doing a similar thing with AMP. They are walking a fine line.

kkarakk 8y ago
you don't HAVE to use google search. everyone just prefers it. people prefer bing for searching videos(less censorship) and duck duck go for more organic results. i don't think the AMP carousel is anything but a feature. people need to stop treating companies as services. products can go away in the blink of an eye.
- Un1corn 8y ago
  You never HAD to use Windows
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  Why is there constant advocacy to do away with anti-trust laws on this website?
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    how is it violating anti-trust is what i want to know. you don't put your website on google amp so google ranks you lower - they've told you this upfront. if you don't like google amp you can choose to not support it and take the advertising/SEO hit(which is really a monetary hit) except no, people say they are "forced" to use google amp. well duh, google was also "forced" to make amp due to the shitty way people design websites in general(slow, ads in awkward places leading people to install ad blockers etc etc) amp is inevitable in my opinion - the old style of ads are intolerable to most users now and google needs to keep up since ads are their core business
    - cyborgx7 8y ago
      using your monopoly to force another one of your products on people violates anti-trust law that's how

hexo 8y ago

so, kill google news. who cares about it anyway and if anyone do I just don't get why. google platform stinks more than anything ever microsoft did

zapzupnz 8y ago
Google News is a very useful tool for a lot of people trying to find coverage from sources other than the select few that they might often frequent. I use it to find how international articles affect my country, my area, etc. I also use it to find articles in other languages. Aside from that, Google News content is heavily integrated into the normal Google Search pages. It's not simply a matter of simply ignoring it; Google makes their Google News results some of the top results for searches for current events.
- hexo 8y ago
  Yes it certainly is matter of ignoring it. Only not ignoring that stuff gives it credibility as we gave microsoft products.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    If you think the majority of people are going to ignore what Google posts as the most relevant search result, I don’t think there’s anything more I can say to dissuade you.

jocoda 8y ago

From the article: >... the position on Google’s results that can literally mean the difference between a failed business and one that makes millions of dollars looks to me like your business is the tail, and here you are trying to wag the dog.

xyzal 8y ago

A reminder to all AMP-haters like me: When using Firefox mobile, Google search results become free of AMP crap. Also, you get the added benefit of a browser whose maker has no interest in tracking your every move.

vanderZwan 8y ago
And it has extensions like desktop browsers do, including ones that remove even more modern website bloat
- gourou 8y ago
  You mean built-in extensions or can you add some now?
  - oarfish 8y ago
    This has been possible for as long as I'm using it on Android. Ability to run uBlock is great.
  - matoro 8y ago
    You have always been able to use every desktop extension on mobile FF, at least as long as I have been using it.
    - asdff 8y ago
      Android or iOS?
      - Max_Mustermann 8y ago
        Android. iOS's firefox is Safari (like every browser on the iPhone) with a firefox overlay.

0x54D5 8y ago

I'm starting to despise Google the same way I despise Fox News. You an argue with me on the internet about it all you like but these days if an ex Google employee's resume lands in front of me I steer clear.

C1sc0cat 8y ago

All good points. But not sure why "unlike kinds" should actually be featured - lets be honest your not exactly a household name in publishing. Its hard enough getting a major publishing brand accepted by google as a news publisher.

pizzamoney 8y ago

Why in the earth you would use Google s sandbox es ?

dcbadacd 8y ago

People say AMP is disgusting, but I say that the alternative is even worse. Just go visit delfi.ee, postimees.ee, õhtuleht.ee and you'll see how damn bloated sites become if there's no market pressure to leanness.

patentatt 8y ago
For any other uninformed readers of this comment: .ee is the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Estonia, operated by the Estonian Internet Foundation. (I had to look it up too)
acdha 8y ago
This is true but consider an alternate history where Google cared more about web performance than pushing sites to adopt their proprietary JavaScript toolkit: search rankings would simply incorporate page performance/size measured in real browsers and all of those sites would have a strong incentive to reduce page weight and they could load faster without needing 100KB of AMP JavaScript to successfully load before they start rendering.
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  I'd be glad if that alternate history were the case, but currently AMP seems to be the lesser evil. AMP doesn't make my laptop's fans spin up.
  - acdha 8y ago
    I use Firefox’s content blocking and haven’t had that happen in years except on new installs where I forgot to disable WebM.
    - dcbadacd 8y ago
      I don't use Firefox because my hardware is super weak and hardware acceleration is a must for most things for me - FF doesn't do that.

crazygringo 8y ago

Can someone explain how an AMP page would possibly be slower? Especially given Google's CDN and the fact it's likely to be preloaded in practice? I find myself wondering if this isn't just some artifact of the Chrome tool being used to measure performance -- especially since that tool reports an overall score like "94", not an actual speed -- and the weightings it uses [1] could be different from what AMP is designed specifically to speed up. Also it would have to be measured across a wide variety of locations worldwide, etc., certainly if the author's webserver is in their own city, for example. A lot more data, measured rigorously, would be needed to prove that AMP is actually slower in practice -- it's a bold claim. [1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring

lllr_finger 8y ago
Unless things have changed, you can't think of it as a real CDN. The Google engineer assigned to our AMP launch told us to think of it as a proxy without actually calling it that. Our testing showed that to be an accurate description of how it worked in practice.

cphoover 8y ago

Google AMP needs to die...

JohnFen 8y ago

I personally have a choice about AMP pages -- I ignore them. AMP blows, and if I can't get a non-AMP version of a page, that page doesn't exist for me.