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A Report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting

105 points by velmu 7y ago

amirmasoudabdol 7y ago
I see this more and more recently where a webpage takes ~5 seconds to load if it’s an AMP page if I have some sort of ad blocking (cookie restriction) in place. What’s interesting is that the page content is already loaded but my browser (Safari) is waiting for something to render everything. So, if I have the Reader Mode pre-activated on the same page, I can read the page before the ~5 seconds is over and I can actually see the page!
- ryanpetrich 7y ago
  That's likely due to amp-font, which will wait a certain amount of time for custom fonts to load before continuing with a fallback browser font (see: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-font https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-font)
  - JoshMnem 7y ago
    8 seconds is not a reasonable delay, and AMP pages work perfectly fine if the JavaScript is blocked. Which is going to annoy users more -- a slight delay in a font's loading or an 8-second delay in the entire page's loading? I suspect that Google is trying to get most users to not block their JavaScript by making their access to "the Web" unbearable if they do it. (For other types of user punishment, see the other article on that site: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp... ) I put "the Web" in quotes, because a "standard" that requires you to load JavaScript from Google's servers, lets other sites serve your content while spoofing the URL, attempts to fundamentally change the way navigation on the entire Web works (portals) without input from other browsers, and that most people have to be coerced to use by reducing their traffic if they don't implement it, can't seriously be considered a real standard.
- hadrien01 7y ago
  That's because to create a valid AMP page you need to add an 8 seconds delay of blank page for users that disable Google's third-party js.
  - psandersen 7y ago
    You actually have to make it deliberately slow if Google's js is disabled? that seems a little malicious...
    - hadrien01 7y ago
      Yup. This snippet adds a css animation to make the page white for 8s, and it's stopped by Google's JS or the browser's noscript (which you don't enable if you only block Google's JS and not the domain JS): https://amp.dev/fr/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amp-boilerplate https://amp.dev/fr/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/...
      - amirmasoudabdol 7y ago
        So, is there a way that I can block this tag somehow and drop it during the load time?
        hadrien01 7y ago
        You can add a Stylus stylesheet enabled for the regex .[star]amp.[star] (replace [star] with the star symbol) that contains body{animation:none}, but I don't know if that's good for performance. Edit: Developers can also add that css in their amp style, and it seems to be accepted by the amp validator. AMP devs, you know what to do! ;)
        TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        Btw you can begin a line with two spaces for code formatting: .*amp.*
        7y ago
vorpalhex 7y ago
This was a very well rounded analysis and I agree with it's points. Even though I like AMP in its general case (making the web less of a hog), it's proprietary nature, lack of accessibility and so on are in fact real dings against it.
AJ007 7y ago
Fantastic, a big thanks for doing this. Google probably has the most to benefit from, but I suspect there is something more structural that is leading to poor management decisions. "Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process."
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  > poor management decisions You make the mistake of thinking it is a bad decision for Google to make AMP. It suits Google's interests, that's why it exists. It might be selfish, monopolistic, and harmful to the open web, but Google doesn't have to care.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    This was in reference to many other things going on at Google. It was in Google’s interest if everyone went along with it. They haven’t. Perhaps the strongest opponents now are the webmasters who added amp support and then lost rankings, users, and as revenue. For all that Google has, they have zero control over the platform the majority of the wealthiest internet users in the United States use — iOS. If Apple doesn’t like something, Google has to care.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  My only concern is that Google is big enough to force through changes in the standards too. Chrome+Search is so dominant it's able to steamroll objections pretty effectively through sheer momentum.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
blakesterz 7y ago
"Without user research support, there's no acceptable route to creating new AMP components." I can't think of a way to say this without sounds really cynical... I don't think they can about "users" in the same sense that "user research" would support, but rather they can that users click on whatever AMP is designed to do best, which is I assume ads or paid stuff at the top of search results. I seem to remember Google selling people on this by highlighting it's fast and more people click on it? I would think that's all that matters to them. I can't blame them, that's their job, to get more people to click on more things that Google makes money from.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> When a user uses Chrome for Android to search Google, they get AMP results. When a user tries the same search in Firefox, they only get regular results. Sounds like a win for mobile Firefox.
- jeltz 7y ago
  For sure, AMP was the straw which finally pushed me to install Firefox. My mobile experience is so much better now without AMP.
- nerdjon 7y ago
  I am curious how Firefox does this, it is just a setting to auto redirect AMP to the real page? I primarily stick with Safari since it all syncs with iCloud, that would tempt me to use Firefox.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    It's not Firefox doing it, it's Google. Its search results only serves AMP links to whitelisted user agents.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      I wasn't aware of this. This sounds excellent, as it means I can avoid AMP by spoofing my user agent string.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        Yes, but of course, you miss out on other browser-specific optimizations that way. Also, I believe this is only for Google search results. You might consider a userscript instead, like https://github.com/bentasker/RemoveAMP https://github.com/bentasker/RemoveAMP.
        JohnFen 7y ago
        > you miss out on other browser-specific optimizations that way That idea doesn't actually bother me at all.
pupppet 7y ago
Thanks for being the voice of reason over there Terence, well done.
rjmunro 7y ago
How does it compare to Facebook Instant Articles?
skybrian 7y ago
"Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they'd done to speed up their sites was for nothing." This seems like a backwards way of saying that speed improves for most sites? Isn't that a goal?
- beart 7y ago
  I read this as, there is no longer a compelling reason to speed up your site if AMP always wins by default.
- edent 7y ago
  I wrote the article, let me clarify. Imagine you're a newspaper. You spend lots of money and time optimising your site. More people visit and your search ranking increases because Google takes page speed into account. Your rival newspaper doesn't do any of this. But one day they switch to Google's proprietary language. They now get featured at the top of Google's results page. All your work was for nothing and you have to spend more time + money on an AMP solution. It's no faster than your previous one, and no improvement on user experience. But you have to otherwise you don't get the top spot. There is nothing you can do to differentiate your site from a performance point of view. So, yes, all sites are now fast. That might be good for the users. But it also means that you don't get the free market benefit of optimised sites attracting more users. Which, of course, lowers the quality of content for the user.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Thanks! Yes, I can see how it would be unfortunate for them. In the long term, though, not competing on performance (because it has become good enough, for everyone) means that the competition switches to other things like quality journalism. (Or more cynically, clickbait headlines?) It's not clear that competing over milliseconds like the high-frequency traders do is something we should want.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > It's no faster than your previous one Impossible. You cannot beat preloaded+prerendered.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Major appreciation to Terence Eden for putting his own time and expense into representing the interests of the Internet here. I'm extremely comforted that there are people out there that care enough to take our words here on the Internet and bring them forward in person, and I think if you look at the meeting notes, it's clear there was some real impact.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
What's your solution for instant-loading pages from link aggregation pages? If you have a better solution, the AMP advisory committee will have a reason to change. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and now ours.
- dbbk 7y ago
  Put your site behind a CDN like Cloudflare and cache it aggressively. It's really not rocket science.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    That doesn't make it instant. AMP pages load instantly because AMP prerenders just the part of the page above the fold for multiple links efficiently. If you don't understand the problem AMP solves, you aren't going to be able to offer an alternative solution; and Google, Bing, Baidu, Cloudflare, and the other AMP users are going to ignore you as a crank.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      But you have to give up so much for that "instant load". Personally, as a user, I couldn't care less if a page loads instantly or not. I do care that AMP pages tend to be terrible in multiple ways, though. The solution, of course, is to make it possible for the user to choose whether or not they will get AMP pages. I think that it's telling that Google refuses to address this despite cries for this ability from day 1.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > Personally, as a user, I couldn't care less if a page loads instantly or not. Google's, Bing's, Baidu's, Yahoo! Japan's, and others' metrics show otherwise. If not, they wouldn't use it. I know I prefer instantly loading pages, so I personally seek out results with the lightning logo. > I do care that AMP pages tend to be terrible in multiple ways, though. The people who say this tend to be people who use terrible browsers (i.e., all browsers on iOS) where the instant loading comes at the expense of triggering browser bugs that the user can't avoid by switching to a better browser. For people with non-buggy browsers, the experience is fantastic. > The solution, of course, is to make it possible for the user to choose whether or not they will get AMP pages. That already exists. Use the basic HTML search page. All the aforementioned search engines, including Google, provide one.
Meai 7y ago
I have to agree with this but if Google's goal is to make the web faster then the AMP mission can still be done almost exactly as they are doing it today. Just publish a profiling tool (expanding Lighthouse maybe) that reports the numbers back to Google and then you either get to use their cache and edge servers and get ranked higher or not based on whatever metric that Google wants us to care about. Maybe I'm missing something but that really seems like a much more obvious approach to solving the problem without going through this weird extra webcomponents library, different URL schemes and all that.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > use their cache and edge servers Using the amp cache requires pre-loading content in the end user's browser. That makes things really fast (there is zero request latency to "load" and AMP page), but has security implications. If I stick `window.onload(send a bunch of user analytics to my personal server);` in a preloaded page, than anyone who does a google search where my resource is a result unintentionally loads my page and then has data leaked to me, a random nefarious internet person. So given these two requirements: 1. 0 request latency 2. Prevent data leakage to third parties Come up with a scheme that is different from AMP. Or you can argue that either of these requirements is wrong: that data leakage is okay, or more likely that some low-but non-zero level of latency is alright. But my understanding is that the options are either use something amp-like and get approximately 0 latency, or use something non-amp like, and have latency of 50-100ms minimum on good, wired, HTTP/2 connections for well designed websites, and that becomes really bad, really fast, if you're on a 2g or 3g HTTP/1 connection in rural $wherever that's dropping some packets.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Perhaps give browsers the ability to load cached content across domains? So, Google would tell my browser to cache this resource, and then when another website requests it, it's already available in my cache. I'm sure there are some security/privacy implications that would need to be worked through, but they don't seem insurmountable? It can't be worse than letting websites show fake URLs... (Security-wise, the primary thing that comes to mind is you'd want to store and check a hash of any asset cached by a third party, to make sure they're actually the same file.)
JohnFen 7y ago
I only want one thing from AMP -- the ability to opt out so that I never get an AMP page.

105 points by velmu 7y ago

I see this more and more recently where a webpage takes ~5 seconds to load if it’s an AMP page if I have some sort of ad blocking (cookie restriction) in place. What’s interesting is that the page content is already loaded but my browser (Safari) is waiting for something to render everything. So, if I have the Reader Mode pre-activated on the same page, I can read the page before the ~5 seconds is over and I can actually see the page!

ryanpetrich 7y ago
That's likely due to amp-font, which will wait a certain amount of time for custom fonts to load before continuing with a fallback browser font (see: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-font https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-font)
- JoshMnem 7y ago
  8 seconds is not a reasonable delay, and AMP pages work perfectly fine if the JavaScript is blocked. Which is going to annoy users more -- a slight delay in a font's loading or an 8-second delay in the entire page's loading? I suspect that Google is trying to get most users to not block their JavaScript by making their access to "the Web" unbearable if they do it. (For other types of user punishment, see the other article on that site: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp... ) I put "the Web" in quotes, because a "standard" that requires you to load JavaScript from Google's servers, lets other sites serve your content while spoofing the URL, attempts to fundamentally change the way navigation on the entire Web works (portals) without input from other browsers, and that most people have to be coerced to use by reducing their traffic if they don't implement it, can't seriously be considered a real standard.
hadrien01 7y ago
That's because to create a valid AMP page you need to add an 8 seconds delay of blank page for users that disable Google's third-party js.
- psandersen 7y ago
  You actually have to make it deliberately slow if Google's js is disabled? that seems a little malicious...
  - hadrien01 7y ago
    Yup. This snippet adds a css animation to make the page white for 8s, and it's stopped by Google's JS or the browser's noscript (which you don't enable if you only block Google's JS and not the domain JS): https://amp.dev/fr/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amp-boilerplate https://amp.dev/fr/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/...
    - amirmasoudabdol 7y ago
      So, is there a way that I can block this tag somehow and drop it during the load time?
      - hadrien01 7y ago
        You can add a Stylus stylesheet enabled for the regex .[star]amp.[star] (replace [star] with the star symbol) that contains body{animation:none}, but I don't know if that's good for performance. Edit: Developers can also add that css in their amp style, and it seems to be accepted by the amp validator. AMP devs, you know what to do! ;)
        TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        Btw you can begin a line with two spaces for code formatting: .*amp.*
        7y ago

vorpalhex 7y ago

This was a very well rounded analysis and I agree with it's points. Even though I like AMP in its general case (making the web less of a hog), it's proprietary nature, lack of accessibility and so on are in fact real dings against it.

AJ007 7y ago

Fantastic, a big thanks for doing this. Google probably has the most to benefit from, but I suspect there is something more structural that is leading to poor management decisions. "Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process."

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
> poor management decisions You make the mistake of thinking it is a bad decision for Google to make AMP. It suits Google's interests, that's why it exists. It might be selfish, monopolistic, and harmful to the open web, but Google doesn't have to care.
- AJ007 7y ago
  This was in reference to many other things going on at Google. It was in Google’s interest if everyone went along with it. They haven’t. Perhaps the strongest opponents now are the webmasters who added amp support and then lost rankings, users, and as revenue. For all that Google has, they have zero control over the platform the majority of the wealthiest internet users in the United States use — iOS. If Apple doesn’t like something, Google has to care.
ChrisSD 7y ago
My only concern is that Google is big enough to force through changes in the standards too. Chrome+Search is so dominant it's able to steamroll objections pretty effectively through sheer momentum.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

blakesterz 7y ago

"Without user research support, there's no acceptable route to creating new AMP components." I can't think of a way to say this without sounds really cynical... I don't think they can about "users" in the same sense that "user research" would support, but rather they can that users click on whatever AMP is designed to do best, which is I assume ads or paid stuff at the top of search results. I seem to remember Google selling people on this by highlighting it's fast and more people click on it? I would think that's all that matters to them. I can't blame them, that's their job, to get more people to click on more things that Google makes money from.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> When a user uses Chrome for Android to search Google, they get AMP results. When a user tries the same search in Firefox, they only get regular results. Sounds like a win for mobile Firefox.

jeltz 7y ago
For sure, AMP was the straw which finally pushed me to install Firefox. My mobile experience is so much better now without AMP.
nerdjon 7y ago
I am curious how Firefox does this, it is just a setting to auto redirect AMP to the real page? I primarily stick with Safari since it all syncs with iCloud, that would tempt me to use Firefox.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  It's not Firefox doing it, it's Google. Its search results only serves AMP links to whitelisted user agents.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I wasn't aware of this. This sounds excellent, as it means I can avoid AMP by spoofing my user agent string.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Yes, but of course, you miss out on other browser-specific optimizations that way. Also, I believe this is only for Google search results. You might consider a userscript instead, like https://github.com/bentasker/RemoveAMP https://github.com/bentasker/RemoveAMP.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        > you miss out on other browser-specific optimizations that way That idea doesn't actually bother me at all.

pupppet 7y ago

Thanks for being the voice of reason over there Terence, well done.

rjmunro 7y ago

How does it compare to Facebook Instant Articles?

skybrian 7y ago

"Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they'd done to speed up their sites was for nothing." This seems like a backwards way of saying that speed improves for most sites? Isn't that a goal?

beart 7y ago
I read this as, there is no longer a compelling reason to speed up your site if AMP always wins by default.
edent 7y ago
I wrote the article, let me clarify. Imagine you're a newspaper. You spend lots of money and time optimising your site. More people visit and your search ranking increases because Google takes page speed into account. Your rival newspaper doesn't do any of this. But one day they switch to Google's proprietary language. They now get featured at the top of Google's results page. All your work was for nothing and you have to spend more time + money on an AMP solution. It's no faster than your previous one, and no improvement on user experience. But you have to otherwise you don't get the top spot. There is nothing you can do to differentiate your site from a performance point of view. So, yes, all sites are now fast. That might be good for the users. But it also means that you don't get the free market benefit of optimised sites attracting more users. Which, of course, lowers the quality of content for the user.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Thanks! Yes, I can see how it would be unfortunate for them. In the long term, though, not competing on performance (because it has become good enough, for everyone) means that the competition switches to other things like quality journalism. (Or more cynically, clickbait headlines?) It's not clear that competing over milliseconds like the high-frequency traders do is something we should want.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > It's no faster than your previous one Impossible. You cannot beat preloaded+prerendered.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Major appreciation to Terence Eden for putting his own time and expense into representing the interests of the Internet here. I'm extremely comforted that there are people out there that care enough to take our words here on the Internet and bring them forward in person, and I think if you look at the meeting notes, it's clear there was some real impact.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

What's your solution for instant-loading pages from link aggregation pages? If you have a better solution, the AMP advisory committee will have a reason to change. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and now ours.

dbbk 7y ago
Put your site behind a CDN like Cloudflare and cache it aggressively. It's really not rocket science.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  That doesn't make it instant. AMP pages load instantly because AMP prerenders just the part of the page above the fold for multiple links efficiently. If you don't understand the problem AMP solves, you aren't going to be able to offer an alternative solution; and Google, Bing, Baidu, Cloudflare, and the other AMP users are going to ignore you as a crank.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    But you have to give up so much for that "instant load". Personally, as a user, I couldn't care less if a page loads instantly or not. I do care that AMP pages tend to be terrible in multiple ways, though. The solution, of course, is to make it possible for the user to choose whether or not they will get AMP pages. I think that it's telling that Google refuses to address this despite cries for this ability from day 1.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > Personally, as a user, I couldn't care less if a page loads instantly or not. Google's, Bing's, Baidu's, Yahoo! Japan's, and others' metrics show otherwise. If not, they wouldn't use it. I know I prefer instantly loading pages, so I personally seek out results with the lightning logo. > I do care that AMP pages tend to be terrible in multiple ways, though. The people who say this tend to be people who use terrible browsers (i.e., all browsers on iOS) where the instant loading comes at the expense of triggering browser bugs that the user can't avoid by switching to a better browser. For people with non-buggy browsers, the experience is fantastic. > The solution, of course, is to make it possible for the user to choose whether or not they will get AMP pages. That already exists. Use the basic HTML search page. All the aforementioned search engines, including Google, provide one.

Meai 7y ago

I have to agree with this but if Google's goal is to make the web faster then the AMP mission can still be done almost exactly as they are doing it today. Just publish a profiling tool (expanding Lighthouse maybe) that reports the numbers back to Google and then you either get to use their cache and edge servers and get ranked higher or not based on whatever metric that Google wants us to care about. Maybe I'm missing something but that really seems like a much more obvious approach to solving the problem without going through this weird extra webcomponents library, different URL schemes and all that.

joshuamorton 7y ago
> use their cache and edge servers Using the amp cache requires pre-loading content in the end user's browser. That makes things really fast (there is zero request latency to "load" and AMP page), but has security implications. If I stick `window.onload(send a bunch of user analytics to my personal server);` in a preloaded page, than anyone who does a google search where my resource is a result unintentionally loads my page and then has data leaked to me, a random nefarious internet person. So given these two requirements: 1. 0 request latency 2. Prevent data leakage to third parties Come up with a scheme that is different from AMP. Or you can argue that either of these requirements is wrong: that data leakage is okay, or more likely that some low-but non-zero level of latency is alright. But my understanding is that the options are either use something amp-like and get approximately 0 latency, or use something non-amp like, and have latency of 50-100ms minimum on good, wired, HTTP/2 connections for well designed websites, and that becomes really bad, really fast, if you're on a 2g or 3g HTTP/1 connection in rural $wherever that's dropping some packets.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Perhaps give browsers the ability to load cached content across domains? So, Google would tell my browser to cache this resource, and then when another website requests it, it's already available in my cache. I'm sure there are some security/privacy implications that would need to be worked through, but they don't seem insurmountable? It can't be worse than letting websites show fake URLs... (Security-wise, the primary thing that comes to mind is you'd want to store and check a hash of any asset cached by a third party, to make sure they're actually the same file.)

JohnFen 7y ago

I only want one thing from AMP -- the ability to opt out so that I never get an AMP page.