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You should try loading "the modern web" over a not great but passable phone connection (ie 3G maximum) on a non-flagship phone. Nearly every normal website you

You should try loading "the modern web" over a not great but passable phone connection (ie 3G maximum) on a non-flagship phone. Nearly every normal website you will have an exceedingly bad time on. That's what AMP claims to solve. Far be it from me to claim they succeeded or that they are doing it in the right way, but I think pretending the problem doesn't exist at all is disingenuous.

StreamBright 8y ago
Why not fixing “the moder web” then?
- r3bl 8y ago
  Because convincing all the website owners to do anything (even if it clearly benefits everyone) is an impossible task. See HTTPS adoption.
  - radus 8y ago
    Isn't https over the hump in most of the world?
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    HTTPS adoption: https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/04/253fa7e9-ssl.png https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018... Great example. You just proved my point that it is possible to have positive change in large communities.
    - r3bl 8y ago
      I'm not sure that graph shows what you think it shows. That graph shows that there's an obnoxiously large number of websites that don't support something that there's zero reason not to support. It costs $0 and takes maybe half an hour to implement, browsers are screaming "not secure" to each visitor, and one in five websites still don't support it. "Make websites faster", on top of being vague, is way more difficult to implement.
      - piva00 8y ago
        1 in 5 NOT supporting it is much better than the opposite when I started working in the web where 90+% of websites didn't support HTTPS.
      - StreamBright 8y ago
        Well, I like the percentages and the direction that the graph is heading.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    You don't have to convince anyone, it's about incentives. The article and many others have shown exactly how to do this: make the metric a big part of search rankings. If fast site performance ensures you get listed first, every site would get faster overnight.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Google can't block ads and tracking scripts in Chrome without either blocking their own, or facing (valid) claims of anti-competitive behaviour. Neither of which would get the person who did it promoted. And no attempt to fix the slowness of the modern web will succeed without blocking ads and tracking scripts. This is the downside of the dominant browser being made by and ads-and-tracking company.
emerongi 8y ago
AMP is a terrible user experience though. Google Search on mobile is - pardon my language - fucked now. I hate it. I get trapped in the cache, getting to the actual source is pain, there's some stupid bar on top, websites are showing their own bars to signify that the user is not actually on the website. And I'm a techie, I know how this works! I imagine regular users must be utterly confused.
- piva00 8y ago
  Thanks for voicing this out. I'm on the same boat, AMP is a terrible user experience. It takes me multiple clumsy steps to get to the content page I thought I was getting to when I clicked a link. Apart from that a lot of websites started showing an overlay on top of the AMP pages, clicking on AMP pages don't work as expected a lot of times, it has a noticeable delay between actions (scrolling/tapping). I disliked AMP when I first started seeing it but the way it has evolved has made the experience way worse than it started with... Probably because Google also caved in and tried to cater to customisations requests from big publishers.
blunte 8y ago
I have 4G and a top end phone, and mobile web is getting worse by the day. The first solution is not AMP. The first solution is to go back to when a web page was a "page", not a program made up of cobbled together bits of JavaScript. Cookie preference popups, join the newsletter popups, animated or dynamic ads, and everything else stupid websites do that causes the browser's rendering engine to grind away non-stop... The current user experience is worse than I think it ever was. But as other posters have comments, AMP is probably intended to be a control and data tracking system first, with user experience being second or lower priority.
JetSpiegel 8y ago
This is easily solved by installing Firefox for Android and uBlock Origin. I don't even understand how people tolerate the "modern" web otherwise.

StreamBright 8y ago

Why not fixing “the moder web” then?

r3bl 8y ago
Because convincing all the website owners to do anything (even if it clearly benefits everyone) is an impossible task. See HTTPS adoption.
- radus 8y ago
  Isn't https over the hump in most of the world?
- StreamBright 8y ago
  HTTPS adoption: https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/04/253fa7e9-ssl.png https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018... Great example. You just proved my point that it is possible to have positive change in large communities.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    I'm not sure that graph shows what you think it shows. That graph shows that there's an obnoxiously large number of websites that don't support something that there's zero reason not to support. It costs $0 and takes maybe half an hour to implement, browsers are screaming "not secure" to each visitor, and one in five websites still don't support it. "Make websites faster", on top of being vague, is way more difficult to implement.
    - piva00 8y ago
      1 in 5 NOT supporting it is much better than the opposite when I started working in the web where 90+% of websites didn't support HTTPS.
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      Well, I like the percentages and the direction that the graph is heading.
- manigandham 8y ago
  You don't have to convince anyone, it's about incentives. The article and many others have shown exactly how to do this: make the metric a big part of search rankings. If fast site performance ensures you get listed first, every site would get faster overnight.
michaelt 8y ago
Google can't block ads and tracking scripts in Chrome without either blocking their own, or facing (valid) claims of anti-competitive behaviour. Neither of which would get the person who did it promoted. And no attempt to fix the slowness of the modern web will succeed without blocking ads and tracking scripts. This is the downside of the dominant browser being made by and ads-and-tracking company.

emerongi 8y ago

AMP is a terrible user experience though. Google Search on mobile is - pardon my language - fucked now. I hate it. I get trapped in the cache, getting to the actual source is pain, there's some stupid bar on top, websites are showing their own bars to signify that the user is not actually on the website. And I'm a techie, I know how this works! I imagine regular users must be utterly confused.

piva00 8y ago
Thanks for voicing this out. I'm on the same boat, AMP is a terrible user experience. It takes me multiple clumsy steps to get to the content page I thought I was getting to when I clicked a link. Apart from that a lot of websites started showing an overlay on top of the AMP pages, clicking on AMP pages don't work as expected a lot of times, it has a noticeable delay between actions (scrolling/tapping). I disliked AMP when I first started seeing it but the way it has evolved has made the experience way worse than it started with... Probably because Google also caved in and tried to cater to customisations requests from big publishers.

blunte 8y ago

I have 4G and a top end phone, and mobile web is getting worse by the day. The first solution is not AMP. The first solution is to go back to when a web page was a "page", not a program made up of cobbled together bits of JavaScript. Cookie preference popups, join the newsletter popups, animated or dynamic ads, and everything else stupid websites do that causes the browser's rendering engine to grind away non-stop... The current user experience is worse than I think it ever was. But as other posters have comments, AMP is probably intended to be a control and data tracking system first, with user experience being second or lower priority.

JetSpiegel 8y ago

This is easily solved by installing Firefox for Android and uBlock Origin. I don't even understand how people tolerate the "modern" web otherwise.