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AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare. Starting

AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare. Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load. At Cloudflare there are other problems. If you're a CF customer and have the option enabled, your AMP page hosted on CF servers will do some nasty stuff. Specifically outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted. Presented to anyone clicking off your CF AMP page as the actual site but not. Instead CF gets the hits and you never see it. I've seen the CF bots doing this to my domain. But CF never responds to emails from anyone that isn't a customer. As for AMP for email I don't know the specific downsides besides the obvious corporate centralization and control this gives. But it certainly doesn't have any purpose. And I say this as a guy that only reads email as text and never renders HTML.

Kamshak 7y ago
> AMP does not actually make loading any faster Every AMP link i click on google loads crazy fast. I don't know why the implementation details or google's incentivizing it would make this not count for some reason. I don't like what amp is doing to the web either but the user experience is really good, pages do load much quicker than your average page and I find myself preferring them a lot over the uncertainty and frustration when you click other links on a bad connection
- dheera 7y ago
  Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content. Plain HTML and one CSS file (read: one, not five, not ten CSS files) minus the JavaScript bloat would also load insanely fast. It doesn't have to be AMP. Try the basic HTML verson of Gmail -- it loads about 5-10X faster than the AJAX version.
  - ejcx 7y ago
    You're correct. No js bloat. In order to load Js files it has to be in accordance with the AMP spec and they have a strict list of js you can load.
  - untog 7y ago
    > Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content. That's actually completely untrue. Every AMP component is a web component and requires JavaScript in order to run at all. And many have their own .js file powering it. You literally can't use an <img> tag on an AMP page. You have to use <amp-img>, which has a JS dependency. OP is right, the primary reason AMP is fast is because Google is preloading the page in the background. AMP pages themselves aren't all that static, or really all that bandwidth efficient.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Or the site you're already on: HN.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
> When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News is that a publisher has to create an AMP page once and then gets to integrate with the multiple link aggregators that support AMP for free. If I want to create my own link aggregator, I don't need a FAANG's clout to get publishers to integrate with me for instant-loading pages — I can use their existing AMP pages.
- sametmax 7y ago
  You could do that with regular HTML. Google crawling everything would easily let them know if a page is light and easy to preload, giving and incentive to web dev to make it so, instead of creating a lock in solution.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > You could do that with regular HTML. You ignored the safely qualifier. You would deanonymize a user to the publisher and the third party trackers on their page even if the user never clicks through to visit the page.
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    AMP can be preloaded because it's designed to be preloaded. Regular HTML pages have side effects that can't be accounted for. lern_too_spel is right. That is literally what AMP was built for. Let's watch as HN downvotes the correction while upvoting the misinformation in the top-comment. edit: Downvote and flag. Very disappointing.
    - ricardobeat 7y ago
      Side effects such as?
SahAssar 7y ago
> outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted That sounds very shady... Do they only do this if the third party link has a amp page or do they just do this for all pages?
derefr 7y ago
I’m assuming you run an ad-blocker? Because the main difference in loading time is seen between a webpage with regular ads, and a webpage with ads that are forced to use the AMP ad framework. Without ads, sure, the difference in total latency before DOMContentLoaded is negligible. > But it certainly doesn’t have any purpose. “HTML” email is actually “email that renders HTML and CSS according to the semantics of Outlook 97’s HTML renderer that it borrowed from Word 97’s HTML editor.” Email clients stick to this because it’s a universal de-facto standard, and is still technically HTML. But it wouldn’t be AMP, since AMP specifies how a given blob of AMP should render in very fine detail. Standardizing on AMP for email would be one way of breaking free of the current legacy of email HTML rendering semantics. There are other ways of doing that, but AMP is one of the only ones that does that while also specifying a packaging format for web-page archives that has MIME-compatible semantics (so that e.g. you can send all the media of a page embedded into the page’s envelope.)
- itslennysfault 7y ago
  Seems like a solution looking for a problem. The internet is plenty fast enough for loading simple news/blog posts. I haven't found find myself thinking "geeze I wish this article would load faster" in a long time.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    Are you one of the hundreds of millions of people who browses the internet primarily on a 3g or slower mobile connection in Asia?
    - emayljames 7y ago
      This would largely be a good case if not for the fact that it is pushed on everyone, everywhere; without a choice.
      - jchw 7y ago
        You should be able to disable the option in your e-mail client and get plain HTML e-mail instead. In Gmail, the option is 'Dynamic email.'
kingbirdy 7y ago
> outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted This sounds like an open and shut copyright lawsuit to me, if a DMCA request doesn't take care of it
- jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
  HN 2019: can't scroll down for a single page without seeing "hackers" begging for more lawsuits and government regulation.
macspoofing 7y ago
>AMP is bad for everything. Not everything. I get all the arguments against it and I don't disagree but man ... AMP is fast. It is really fast, and there is something to be said about forcing content providers to build their web application that makes them this fast. >AMP does not actually make loading any faster. What are you talking about. It does make it faster. You feel it, even on my modern Pixel 3 on LTE. Can you imagine if you're running a feature phone on 3G?
- emayljames 7y ago
  Google pre-loads the AMP pages before you have clicked on them, regardless of if you will or you want it to.
comex 7y ago
> Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load. You're missing the part where AMP's sandboxed design is required for Google to be able to safely pre-load results, which it can only do on its own origin due to browser restrictions. Which is one of the main reasons that AMP exists in the first place. It's a nasty hack, but effective. The Web Packaging standard (also Google's work) might remove the need for it, when it's implemented in browsers... someday. Though with Mozilla against it, who knows what will happen.
- AgentME 7y ago
  Yeah I felt like GP was saying "combustion engines are not actually any faster than horses, they just use gasoline to make it seem like they are". The gasoline/preloading isn't a coincidental factor that can be ignored while judging the thing.

Kamshak 7y ago

> AMP does not actually make loading any faster Every AMP link i click on google loads crazy fast. I don't know why the implementation details or google's incentivizing it would make this not count for some reason. I don't like what amp is doing to the web either but the user experience is really good, pages do load much quicker than your average page and I find myself preferring them a lot over the uncertainty and frustration when you click other links on a bad connection

dheera 7y ago
Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content. Plain HTML and one CSS file (read: one, not five, not ten CSS files) minus the JavaScript bloat would also load insanely fast. It doesn't have to be AMP. Try the basic HTML verson of Gmail -- it loads about 5-10X faster than the AJAX version.
- ejcx 7y ago
  You're correct. No js bloat. In order to load Js files it has to be in accordance with the AMP spec and they have a strict list of js you can load.
- untog 7y ago
  > Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content. That's actually completely untrue. Every AMP component is a web component and requires JavaScript in order to run at all. And many have their own .js file powering it. You literally can't use an <img> tag on an AMP page. You have to use <amp-img>, which has a JS dependency. OP is right, the primary reason AMP is fast is because Google is preloading the page in the background. AMP pages themselves aren't all that static, or really all that bandwidth efficient.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Or the site you're already on: HN.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

> When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News is that a publisher has to create an AMP page once and then gets to integrate with the multiple link aggregators that support AMP for free. If I want to create my own link aggregator, I don't need a FAANG's clout to get publishers to integrate with me for instant-loading pages — I can use their existing AMP pages.

sametmax 7y ago
You could do that with regular HTML. Google crawling everything would easily let them know if a page is light and easy to preload, giving and incentive to web dev to make it so, instead of creating a lock in solution.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > You could do that with regular HTML. You ignored the safely qualifier. You would deanonymize a user to the publisher and the third party trackers on their page even if the user never clicks through to visit the page.
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  AMP can be preloaded because it's designed to be preloaded. Regular HTML pages have side effects that can't be accounted for. lern_too_spel is right. That is literally what AMP was built for. Let's watch as HN downvotes the correction while upvoting the misinformation in the top-comment. edit: Downvote and flag. Very disappointing.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    Side effects such as?

SahAssar 7y ago

> outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted That sounds very shady... Do they only do this if the third party link has a amp page or do they just do this for all pages?

derefr 7y ago

I’m assuming you run an ad-blocker? Because the main difference in loading time is seen between a webpage with regular ads, and a webpage with ads that are forced to use the AMP ad framework. Without ads, sure, the difference in total latency before DOMContentLoaded is negligible. > But it certainly doesn’t have any purpose. “HTML” email is actually “email that renders HTML and CSS according to the semantics of Outlook 97’s HTML renderer that it borrowed from Word 97’s HTML editor.” Email clients stick to this because it’s a universal de-facto standard, and is still technically HTML. But it wouldn’t be AMP, since AMP specifies how a given blob of AMP should render in very fine detail. Standardizing on AMP for email would be one way of breaking free of the current legacy of email HTML rendering semantics. There are other ways of doing that, but AMP is one of the only ones that does that while also specifying a packaging format for web-page archives that has MIME-compatible semantics (so that e.g. you can send all the media of a page embedded into the page’s envelope.)

itslennysfault 7y ago
Seems like a solution looking for a problem. The internet is plenty fast enough for loading simple news/blog posts. I haven't found find myself thinking "geeze I wish this article would load faster" in a long time.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Are you one of the hundreds of millions of people who browses the internet primarily on a 3g or slower mobile connection in Asia?
  - emayljames 7y ago
    This would largely be a good case if not for the fact that it is pushed on everyone, everywhere; without a choice.
    - jchw 7y ago
      You should be able to disable the option in your e-mail client and get plain HTML e-mail instead. In Gmail, the option is 'Dynamic email.'

kingbirdy 7y ago

> outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted This sounds like an open and shut copyright lawsuit to me, if a DMCA request doesn't take care of it

jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
HN 2019: can't scroll down for a single page without seeing "hackers" begging for more lawsuits and government regulation.

macspoofing 7y ago

>AMP is bad for everything. Not everything. I get all the arguments against it and I don't disagree but man ... AMP is fast. It is really fast, and there is something to be said about forcing content providers to build their web application that makes them this fast. >AMP does not actually make loading any faster. What are you talking about. It does make it faster. You feel it, even on my modern Pixel 3 on LTE. Can you imagine if you're running a feature phone on 3G?

emayljames 7y ago
Google pre-loads the AMP pages before you have clicked on them, regardless of if you will or you want it to.

comex 7y ago

> Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load. You're missing the part where AMP's sandboxed design is required for Google to be able to safely pre-load results, which it can only do on its own origin due to browser restrictions. Which is one of the main reasons that AMP exists in the first place. It's a nasty hack, but effective. The Web Packaging standard (also Google's work) might remove the need for it, when it's implemented in browsers... someday. Though with Mozilla against it, who knows what will happen.

AgentME 7y ago
Yeah I felt like GP was saying "combustion engines are not actually any faster than horses, they just use gasoline to make it seem like they are". The gasoline/preloading isn't a coincidental factor that can be ignored while judging the thing.