17 ms·

Ask HN: How can we destroy AMP?

486 points by buboard 7y ago

All ideas welcome

jawns 7y ago
Easy. Just destroy Google. Done.
- codegladiator 7y ago
  If it's so easy, why haven't you done it already ?
  - SapporoChris 7y ago
    Ability to destroy should never be confused with desire to destroy. Sometimes they overlap, most often times they do not. edited to add links and further comments. I didn't know what it was, so I did a quick search and found this rosy picture painted in 2016. https://www.hallaminternet.com/what-is-amp-and-who-actually-needs-it/ https://www.hallaminternet.com/what-is-amp-and-who-actually-... and here is a Register Link decrying it as worst thing ever. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
    - codegladiator 7y ago
      Sorry man, I was just referencing joker from the dark knight for humour :-/
- geofft 7y ago
  I wonder if it is sufficient to fire the people at Google who work on AMP. Is management actually invested in AMP enough to re-staff it, or are they merely okay with it?
decentralizer 7y ago
By creating a extension which blocks AMP, for ourselves. But, if we really need to destroy AMP from internet. Unfortunately it is not really possible, unless if you have enough money to buy Google.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Probably the only useful way to fight Google is to promote non-Google controlled web browsers with adblockers.
- tedmiston 7y ago
  Seems like a reasonable solution on desktops, but where I see AMP the most is on mobile. I don't think it's possible to block AMP in Safari on iOS.
  - decentralizer 7y ago
    Actually it is possible. It doesn't have to done on client-side. You can do it via DNS settings with Pi-Hole on your network, or create your own private tunnel with Pi-Hole. After that, you need to block subdomains with amp.. Or even you can create your own iOS app for it, and yes it is also possible.
    - tedmiston 7y ago
      Great idea. Do you have more info on how this can be done with the Pi-hole? I have been wanting to set one up already anyway.
djflutt3rshy 7y ago
Reduce the demand for it. Include easily accessible "article only" mode, make your site friendly to current Reader Modes for all major browsers. No obtrusive ads, no 500 trackers bogging down the browser. Quick loading. Just give us the info we need, nothing more. Just like ad blockers were a response to websites not respecting people's attention and safety, likewise AMP is a response to them not respecting people's time.
- buboard 7y ago
  I m more wary about google ranking amp pages higher. I m not sure if amp is a response
- untog 7y ago
  All of that would be awesome, but it won't kill AMP. AMP isn't popular because users love it. It's popular because Google shows AMP-only results for the first screen (often two or more screens) of search results on their site. You can make as beautiful an experience as you want, but users won't see it when they search, so they won't ever get to experience it.
  - jotm 7y ago
    I haven't seen an AMP page in over 2 years, and I use Google search a lot. Anytime I saw one I clicked away in disgust, so maybe they're filtered for me. The problem is all the people and big websites that don't seem to care at all about their own content pushing amp as some sort of great solution for website speed. Sad, but it seems to have died down.
    - adventured 7y ago
      AMP results are persistently - as in, without exception - at the top of all results for any search that has an active news event attached to it. Right now nine of the first ten results for "Walmart shooting" in incognito mode stock Chrome on Android, are AMP articles. Do that search, if you're not seeing those AMP articles then you're doing something very unusual with your setup.
nudpiedo 7y ago
You can lobby against it in the same fashion there was a small campaign against infinite scrolling portals. Also you can create an extension for yourself which rewrites the URL and opens the slow version of the same page. At the end everyone is free, for the good or for the bad.
PaulHoule 7y ago
(1) The political attack: Google is increasingly coming under fire for being a monopolist. Such attacks could lead to the demise of or restrictions being put on AMP. (2) The technical attack: kill the web as we know it. The idea here is that the web is hopelessly corrupted by the entanglement of text with code (e.g. Javascript,) the advertising-based business model, pop-ups, etc. A particular sign of this is "scanning" behavior where you go to Google News or Hacker News or your round of daily blogs and hit "reload" to see what is new. This has multiple insidious effects on the human nervous system, one is that some of your attention is used to suppress content that you've seen before, which lowers your working IQ. It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.
- krapp 7y ago
  >It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc. Your cure is worse than the disease. At the moment, I can choose to use AMP or not, can choose to use Javascript or not, and can choose to publish whatever I like to the web, and whomever wants to can read it. Your solution would appear to require me to only publish static documents which are "new, interesting, non-toxic, etc," under some arbitrary and proprietary guidelines, because that's all people would (or should) be allowed to see. No thank you. I'd rather have freedom from all of the gatekeepers of web culture, be they FAANG or contrarian hackers.
- buboard 7y ago
  Be careful with that thinking. The web is truly open (thank you TBL). Any other ‘smart’ app platform is a golden chain ( well , silver or aluminum, depending on app sales)
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  "I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc" NNTP at least you can scan what is new, and other criteria you can program yourself (it can't automatically know what is interesting, so you will have to program in your own criteria for that).
martin_a 7y ago
I think eliminating the demand is the ultimate way. The "promise" of AMP is fast delivery of the page and ease of use on mobile devices. Once we (as in "content creators" or whatever) start building our sites that way, AMP will get used less and less.
- donohoe 7y ago
  And that has started. Checkout ThoughtCo from DotDash https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-equations-4157661 https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-equations... http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba97be25433862/ http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba... One side-effect is AMP now provides a reason not to do anything about your regular crappy pages.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    Big thumbs up! Looks great on mobile and works very well. I think I will drop them a line and congratulate them later on their efforts. Maybe others should do so, too.
- jotm 7y ago
  Even if your website isn't up to the ridiculous speed standards of some tests, do yourself a favour and remove AMP. Your content and website are more important than 2 seconds shaved off the load speed. And start using smarter monetising techniques, not just stupid PPV/PPC ads.
- buboard 7y ago
  > Once we (as in "content creators" or whatever) start building our sites that way, AMP will get used less and less That is the sad part and why it needs to die - it won't stop. Google prioritizes their own system regardless of your work.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    They aren't mutually exclusive, though. Even if AMP died, if reading / clicking thru to your web site is a bad experience (slow loads, lots of ads, autoplay of video that's unrelated to the article, clickbait links loaded by partners, etc) these are all friction against users returning and weigh on your site's reputation. If all of the players in the space use the same tactics, users will gladly migrate towards lower friction environments.
haasted 7y ago
Add an option in adblocking software that automatically redirects to the real article. I imagine there’s a fairly big overlap between users of adblocking software and users that dislike amp.
starbugs 7y ago
To me it looks as if AMP is on the edge of being legal in terms of antitrust law. Even if Google doesn't admit to it, I bet they prefer AMPed sites in the ranking. The AMP icon might be another thing that makes it difficult with regard to legal considerations. This might be one of its major weaknesses.
tyingq 7y ago
There's a fair amount of interest in the US Congress to entertain antitrust conversation around Google, Facebook, etc. Find some way to get a charismatic US Senator spun up about AMP.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Not personally recommended, but... AMP pages are hosted on a google.com uri. Get some kind of controversial content up on an AMP page, and start a grassroots "OMG, Google is hosting this bad content via AMP" campaign going with some tech-ignorant group. Maybe works better if AMP is fronting some other Google controlled user-content domain.
  - buboard 7y ago
    We could probably push to categorize google.com as spam/dangerous
EwanToo 7y ago
I've switched to bing search as an experiment, that's basically how you kill AMP
- buboard 7y ago
  i use bing and yandex for my image searches every time. google images is rubbish
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Unfortunately Bing also implements AMP. :/
deweller 7y ago
Can you give me a high level overview of what your motivation is for destroying AMP? I'm not trying to troll. I really would like to know.
- buboard 7y ago
  I don't, but i am asking how it can be done. I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem
  - krapp 7y ago
    >I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem How would it be unstoppable? Google isn't a government. They don't own or control the web, nor do they have the force of law or men with guns pointed at web developers, forcing them to use AMP. It's no more likely to "seize the entire web" than ActiveX or Silverlight.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > They don't own or control the web, Really? name a long tail website that doesn't SEO for google
      - krapp 7y ago
        Not every site on the web is a business that's concerned with SEO... and claiming that Google controls the visibility of online businesses is not a claim that they control the web. And they don't even really control the visibility of online businesses, so much as have outsized influence over it. It's possible to run a business and not be the first search result on Google, and other search engines do exist, as well as other venues for advertisement and promotion.
        buboard 7y ago
        you didn't name one though
the_duke 7y ago
No-one has mentioned the to me most obvious answer: if your employer wants to/is using AMP, heavily lobby against it. Convince other developers. Get your manager on your side. Write the CEO. Do so with good arguments why it's a bad move, not with "omg Google is evil". Do the same thing as a user: if you are using a site that has AMP deployed, write them. Them them why it's bad for them and for their users, and how this pushes you to other alternatives.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That requires having a reason to oppose AMP beyond generalized dislike of Google.
  - donohoe 7y ago
    Start with this http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      The very first reason it gives is nonsense. Your boss will probably laugh at you if not fire you. "AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google." No, it keeps users within the link aggregator's domain, whether that is Google, Bing, Baidu, or a link aggregator made by a third party. The publisher is OK with this because it makes loading from all of those link aggregators instant, just like when they publish for Apple News; but in this case, they can publish once and support multiple aggregators.
      - donohoe 7y ago
        As someone who works for publishers, no, we were not happy about this at all and it did pull readers from our sites.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
The reason why we have AMP in the first place is that normal news websites are unusable. The extra caching/preloading it enables is a bonus, but the main benefit comes from AMP websites not being as shitty as regular sits. It's pretty easy to make usable web sites with regular HTML, and it's almost certainly possible to make just as shitty AMP sites. However, AMP solved the political/bureaucratic problem by providing a strong carrot to make a non-shitty version of the web site, and made it easier to make a non-shitty one than a shitty one. The publishers already have to spend time remaking their web site, and the goal they get provided with is "keep it simple and lightweight", and doing shitty things is made hard/expensive. So they grumble and do it, getting it mostly right. (Although they seem to have realized the "potential" and started shittifying the AMP pages too). They could have a normal experience that is very similar. Yet, they still serve the non-AMP, ad- and tracker-laden main page that takes 20x as long to load, jumps around while doing so, and tries to blast you with an autoplaying video that remains stuck to your screen while you scroll. I don't get the hate for AMP - it somehow succeeded in the impossible quest to get publishers to make less shitty web sites, and it does improve user experience by preloading the pages. It's just like with the "acceptable ads" program - some web sites participating in it serve significantly less shitty ads to people who only allow "acceptable ads", while serving a worse version _of the same ad_ to everyone else. So maybe, to answer your question: Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser. Much harder to do and unlikely to get enough momentum/incentive to actually succeed, though.
- buboard 7y ago
  Or, make a service to convert those unusable news sites to tolerable.
  - pvorb 7y ago
    No need for a service. Firefox comes with readability, Safari has reader mode.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
SimonPStevens 7y ago
AMP itself is not the problem. It is actual one possible solution to the problem of heavy slow pages. The problem is that it is tied to Google. We don't need to destroy it, we need to make it into an open standard that all browsers and search engines can implement for the same benefits.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Done. amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amphtml/
  - tyingq 7y ago
    An open standard that includes rules like "your page must include this Google controlled JS url which will contain whatever we want". That pretty much kills the "open" bit.
    - geofft 7y ago
      Agree, but technically if the spec is well-defined browsers can recognize that JS URL as a magic string instead of actually loading that JS, sorta like how browsers don't actually go to w3c.org when they see an HTML 4.01 doctype. Perhaps the right place is to lobby the WHATWG for an explicit exception in the definition of the script tag to handle these ampproject.org URLs in an API-compatible way.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        If you don't load the js, the amp specific tags don't work. So, for example, no images.
        geofft 7y ago
        I mean that browsers should implement support for the AMP-specific tags directly, without needing to load the JS to do so. If the AMP spec is complete, then this should theoretically be possible.
donohoe 7y ago
The whole marketing aspect behind AMP is that its fast. This is the narrative that has sucked most publishers in. It is also not true (to the degree you think). I run a leaderboard of major news publishes (mostly English language based ones). It relies on WebPageTest.org and tests about 60+ articles pages nightly on 3G and 'Fast 3G' speeds. The myth that you cannot have a fast web page AND have ads on it is a myth. Several organizations do it and do it well (DotDash dominates the board with their sites). https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ Before I hit API limits on WPT I was also testing against the AMP version of the page too. The speed differences between the regular page load and the AMP page load was often very similar. I recall in some cases (Quartz, Guardian, NYT) that regular pages loaded faster than AMP. That aside, assuming a regular web page took 10 seconds to load (a top 10 article) you would expect that the AMP page would be faster, say down to 2 or 3 seconds in Load Time in order to make the effort of having yet another template/format to support and to justify the effort to re-implement analytics, pay-wall, and ads? Very often it was the a saving of only a second or two. It all adds up, but as someone who works with resource strapped publishes thats not worth the resources. Thats especially true when I could have spent all that time optimizing our regular pages instead of this other project. Why do people think AMP is faster? Pre-caching by Google. The thing is Google (IMHO) could pre-cache regular web pages too. They don't. They don't even issue guidelines on how to make your site cache friendly, they insist on this whole specification/implementation and insist on hosting it remotely and create all sorts of barriers.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I have a different take. It's not that you can't do normal HTML as fast as AMP. It's that by preventing a lot of the things that make "normal" sites slow, it changes the whole conversation at publishing companies. For example, here is an example conversation at a web company before AMP (and this is not really hypothetical - I had more than a few conversations like this): Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page. Developers: But that will kill page performance! Marketers: But you guys are smart, make it work! And after AMP: Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page. Developers: Get bent. AMP doesn't allow that, and without AMP our SEO positioning will tank. Marketers: Oh, OK.
donohoe 7y ago
Start with this http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/ "We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web." https://github.com/amp-letter/amp-letter.github.io https://github.com/amp-letter/amp-letter.github.io
nairobi222 7y ago
You can lobby against it in the same fashion there was a small campaign against infinite scrolling portals. Also you can create an extension for yourself which rewrites the URL and opens the slow version of the same page. At the end everyone is free, for the good or for the bad.
siriniok 7y ago
"Let's build sites that don't require AMP." *gets thrown out of the window*
zzo38computer 7y ago
If you make many web pages that do not require JavaScript, CSS, and many images or videos, then that also improves the speed, and is better for accessibility. For other cases you do need some scripts and stuff, I have suggested a "widget" attribute nd <widget> element. Both <script> and <widget> elements support the widget attribute. If recognized by the browser and enabled by the user, then the element and its contents are replaced by something implementation-dependent (and not necessarily representable in normal HTML). Otherwise, a <widget> element acts like <span>. This also improves speed, as it can skip loading a script if it has its own version, and possibly also use a native code version specific to the browser or an extension. It also allows better user customization, for example if a special text editing widget is used on the web page (rather than a normal <textbox>), then it can be replaced with one that has vi or emacs key bindings, or to implement it without animations if the user wants to implement that script without animations. The other alternative, for stuff that doesn't need HTML and HTTP, is to use Gopher. Then, no need to consider what kind of user interface is used and any other kind of accessibility; it already is!
nosmokearea 7y ago
Propagandists from Google (lonelappde with his teammates) are already here and try to convince other people how good AMP and Google are...
snek 7y ago
You're asking the wrong question. AMP isn't bad, Google ranking AMP pages over equally-fast non-AMP pages is bad. But Google's main goal here is to preload/render content without the content knowing it is being preloaded, so that the page appears to load instantly when the user clicks on it. What I think actually needs to happen is a standard for deferred navigation where the UA can be told to load a bunch of resources and then choose one of them to actually navigate to (basically what AMP does). The problem here is that Google is (as we type here) actively coming up with horrible standards like signed exchanges so that they never have to send users away from their own domain, so I don't think they would be fans of a standardized system that killed AMP.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  > AMP isn't bad, No, it is clearly bad. You seem to even agree. The stated reason for creating AMP may be good, but the technology and standard itself is bad.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Like all things this is not as black and white as you'd think. AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice and I totally get the flip side of why people think it's dangerous.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      > AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice It is? What do you like about it? What does it help you do more easily? AMP is in no way necessary to build "user-first" fast loading pages. AMP was created to allow aggregators to ensure they could cache and serve content without the user leaving the portal. As publishers are desperate for the traffic, they have adopted AMP to make the aggregators happy. The user is never given a choice, they just end up stuck with a cached AMP page and confused about how to reach the publisher's real website. This "user-first" framework is really more "user-last"
- Element_ 7y ago
  I think a better solution would be for Google to heavily demote pages with slow load times, popup banners, notifications, etc... It would incentivize authors to deliver clean/fast pages while still leaving them freedom to design pages any way they want.
lttlrck 7y ago
Maybe stop using google and other search engines that prioritize AMP in the results. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and don’t miss google at all.
- epistasis 7y ago
  This is what I do and I love it. In order to avoid the AMP experience I had to stop using google web search, and it turned out that I can't tell the difference in results anyway. Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ is a nice little addon when I have to do a search on Google.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    > you'll be tracked far less Citation needed. Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web. I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.
    - ldh 7y ago
      You don't search the web using news sites.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites. I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything. Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains. The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search. If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.
tambourine_man 7y ago
As a user, I go to the trouble of clicking the original link after entering an AMP site. Not much because I think it will make a dent in the access statistics, but because I really hate the experience. As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do, but that's something we could have a hand on changing collectively.
- blahblahblogger 7y ago
  > As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do Agreed. The company I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it. As such money does speak louder and if the users of our product are engaging with it more because of AMP, why would we go against it? Philosophical reasons aren't enough. To give people and companies a reason to oppose AMP you'd need to frame the reasons in a way that includes business considerations.
  - api 7y ago
    What value are they getting other than being ranked higher?
    - mosen 7y ago
      That’s an extremely compelling reason in itself.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it. Do you have an idea how are they monetizing the extra traffic. And how much more traffic is it? If google is strongarming people to use amp, isnt that fundamentally breaking net neutrality?
dccoolgai 7y ago
Conspiracy theory: most of the problems AMP solves were already solved by Google Reader, but it was hard to sell ads on that... so they killed it 2/3 years before introducing AMP to beg the solution and swoop in with AMP.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
You can’t because “everyone else is using it, so we can’t be the only ones not” style thinking.
enriquto 7y ago
Maybe not the easiest, but certainly the most elegant way, is to social engineer the whole society to make "google-free" a really cool thing.
api 7y ago
Make a browser extension to de-amp links?
- rhexs 7y ago
  If only this was possible on Safari mobile.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    You can always buy a Google phone to get away from AMP...
ampthrowaway5 7y ago
Disclaimer: I will be joining Google in a few weeks, opinions are obviously my own. Anon account because I don't know where I stand yet in this regard. I'm one of the few people who doesn't have too much of a problem with AMP (obvious bias aside). Take this advice AMP devs who might be reading: Listen to the community, and communicate back without being condescending. A bit of humility goes a long way. Your developer marketing over AMP is awful and you need to fix it. Not working with the tech community is causing immeasurable damage to the AMP/Google brand for the people who want to work at your company (engineers) who feel personally attacked by this. Be careful. http://ampletter.org http://ampletter.org
- nwienert 7y ago
  If amp didn’t run things with the header on googles servers it would immediately stop being critiqued. Here’s a ridiculously frustrating example of how it ruins the web experience I ran into yesterday: I was looking for supplements, searching google with something like “site:reddit.com best supplement site”. Google directs you to amp reddit. All good so far. So you find a thread full of links in comments. You scroll down and click one and it takes you off reddit. Good. Now you swipe back. What happens? You lose your scroll position entirely. In a huge reddit thread full of links you literally are re-scrolling the page over and over as you try different ones. It completely breaks the web. From the company that literally should be the champion of the web. It’s so backwards and hostile to the platform it’s hard to fathom what they are thinking. Amp could easily achieve all its goals by not forcing that stupid frame, and by letting it be hosted anywhere (google can monitor if they are using a decent CDN based on simple heuristics).
- buboard 7y ago
  Your employer should move AMP widgets into the browser , completely scrap the google CDN from it, and stop prioritizing amp pages.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    This seems like an anti-trust issue.
SamWhited 7y ago
If you're a U.S. voter, vote for Elizabeth Warren (https://elizabethwarren.com/ https://elizabethwarren.com/) in the Democratic primary and then in 2020. She's pledged to break up companies that abuse their position as both the platform and the product. Once we have a congress and executive branch that are amenable to actually enforcing anti-trust laws in office, then make your case that allowing Google to operate AMP servers and prioritize ranking sites that use it is a bad thing. Without regulation, I'm fairly convinced the big tech companies will continue to find ways to abuse their power.
- buboard 7y ago
  At best, google will break out of alphabet. The problem remains. Warren is indeed the most likely to fight google's dominance, but i m afraid regulation will only make it worse for their competitors.
  - SamWhited 7y ago
    What I'm most hoping she tries to do is break Android out of Google. Google owning the app store and forcing their products onto peoples phones with magical root powers that other apps don't have is one of the bigger problems I have with Android and its ecosystem. But we'll see; fingers crossed that the political will exists to actually do something and that she can leverage it.
pknight 7y ago
I would urge people to tell Matt Mullenweg and core WordPress developers that they don't want AMP in WordPress core. Since WordPress runs on >30% of the web, if WP adopts it, it will make the choice for most of the web that websites must shape themselves in the way Google wants it. Google is currently doing a stellar job penetrating WordPress and using its increasing influence to support its own business interests.
- Animats 7y ago
  Probably the most effective move that can be made right now. Affects a huge number of sites. Challenge for WordPress: make it work faster without AMP than with AMP.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    How can you make something faster than prerendered?
    - pcmaffey 7y ago
      Prerender it. Should be table stakes for sites nowadays.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        Well. You can’t prerender a BGP announcement at your ISPs border. So your locally cached prerendered version on -insert some random ISP here- will always be slower than google in 99% of the cases. Been competing against google since 2005, I’ve seen a thing or two.
        pcmaffey 7y ago
        For sure you're not going to be faster than google. But if you're site is > 3x slower than AMP, people will notice and prefer AMP. The point is to stay competitive.
      - 7y ago
pornel 7y ago
Kill the adtech/surveillance industry. AMP is an admission that the open Web has failed. The number of trackers, tag managers, popups and other crap to "monetize" pages has gone out of control and made majority of pages painful to open (at least without some crap filter, like an adblocker — or AMP). If you manage to restore the health of the open Web, it'll be hard to sell a walled garden instead.
gruturo 7y ago
Write to Apple and plead the case properly, framing it as a privacy/tracking issue, which it is. They recently took a lot of steps to safeguard users’ privacy. If they kill it by embedding a de-amp’er in safari, the incentive and ROI to keeping amp pages drops quite a bit. Help your Android-using acquaintances set up Firefox.
- Ayesh 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure you Google can sue Apple if they add a de-AMP feature to Safari on anti competitive grounds.
lvs 7y ago
I love how you all just walked blithely right into the open jaws of this. Naysayers just a year or two ago were getting downvoted to hell on here. Now you've gotten the taste of the acid in the first stomach, and you think there's a way to climb back out. You don't seem to be grasping monopolistic companies as the ruminants they are.
chrischen 7y ago
To kill it you need to propose s truly open alternative that also honestly addresses some of the reasons why Google wants AMP to exist, without ceding control to Google. This probably means some system or voluntary limit on JS/HTML that can ensure fast loading. If anyone were to propose this it’d probably be Bing or DDG.
- buboard 7y ago
  limit javascript to 640K of memory. so easy to implement and would fix most sites. Some other things like custom fonts could be removed from mobile browsers. The rest should be OK - 2 or 3 more seconds to load a page are not important really. After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    > After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial. But finding the right article to read may require browsing through many pages, and after dozens those seconds can add up. Also the solution cannot be to restrict all JS and web pages. It needs to be an open and opt-in framework.
    - buboard 7y ago
      i d be fine with some restriction to JS. Heavy JS pages are bad for the environment and disrespectful of the time of users.
bdarnell 7y ago
Don't destroy it, embrace it. AMP is the low-javascript web many of us pine for. If browsers implemented AMP natively (and it were properly standardized), it would be great, and it has tons of potential for things like RSS readers. Google's heavy-handedness here has a lot of problems, but if they've managed to get publishers on board with a move away from the JS quagmire we should be pushing in the same direction and not fighting against it.
- buboard 7y ago
  embrace something else. It would be lovely if it was implemented natively, disentangled from google, and without google strongarming websites to their own implementation and CDN. They didnt win publishers because of their wonderful implementation, they are literally blackmailing them with deranking if they don't (I suppose I could use a carrot analogy but i m more suspicious) There is so much evil that can happen if AMP becomes the de facto walled garden of the web. I imagine if that happens, then we 'll end up needing google's review before websites can even be reachable. Or a government could order google to effectively shut down a bunch of sites instantly. The current version of amp is worthy of destruction before it grows to become indestructible
- the8472 7y ago
  AMP still includes javascript that does many retarded things, including hiding the site contents until the JS is loaded, often from 3rd party CDNs. So if you're blocking the amp JS then the site just shows a blank screen, until some CSS animation trickery blends it in a few seconds later. In other words if you use a content blocker AMP can be slower than the page would be without it.
  - gregable 7y ago
    AMP hides the entire page to avoid what is known as a Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC). The document unhides as soon as a single AMP javascript resource loads, or an 8s timeout if that fails. That javascript is very cacheable and is often already in the browser cache to begin with.
Waterluvian 7y ago
An important (but not the only) point to consider when answering this question: STOP expecting consumers to give a crap about nerdspeak topics or to care about hypothetical dystopian futures. Almost all users don't know or care about AMP. They just want stuff to load fast.
OldHand2018 7y ago
Why would you want to destroy AMP? AMP is Google's attempt to become the next Compuserve. Just keep doing your own thing and let Google turn itself into a platform for idiots.
- cced 7y ago
  So that another company can replace them?
notatoad 7y ago
It's easy: convince a huge majority of the publications that produce actual content people want to read to start making their websites fast, lightweight, and cacheable. Then there will be no need for AMP. Until you can accomplish that, destroying amp will only make the internet worse.
- xvector 7y ago
  I would rather have slightly slower websites than Google control even more of the web.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    Yeah, but you aren't everybody. That attitude doesn't accomplish anything. Google gains control by finding problems and solving them their way. You can't gain that control back by dismissing those problems. if you want to reduce Google's control you have to solve a problem (that affects other people, not just you) before they do, or in a better way than they can.
    - xvector 7y ago
      I don't really agree here. Solving a problem has never been justification for a solution that brings even more. For example, an totalitarian dictatorship would solve a ton of problems with the US political system today. But that doesn't make it an acceptable solution. When your solution brings more harm than it resolves, it's better not to have it in the first place.
mancerayder 7y ago
Come up with a news aggregation service that's not necessarily Apple news to compete with news.google? Does this require lawyers and negotiations with publishers? Sincerely, news addict
magoon 7y ago
AMP can be great for us, if they would fix the implementation.
clircle 7y ago
Stupid question. I have been using Google Search on my work computer for the past year or so, but I haven't seen any changes to any of the sites I've visited. I use firefox with ublock origin everywhere. Do either of these prevent AMP from loading? or is it so subtle that I don't notice it?
- dingo_bat 7y ago
  Amp is for mobile.

486 points by buboard 7y ago

All ideas welcome

jawns 7y ago

Easy. Just destroy Google. Done.

codegladiator 7y ago
If it's so easy, why haven't you done it already ?
- SapporoChris 7y ago
  Ability to destroy should never be confused with desire to destroy. Sometimes they overlap, most often times they do not. edited to add links and further comments. I didn't know what it was, so I did a quick search and found this rosy picture painted in 2016. https://www.hallaminternet.com/what-is-amp-and-who-actually-needs-it/ https://www.hallaminternet.com/what-is-amp-and-who-actually-... and here is a Register Link decrying it as worst thing ever. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
  - codegladiator 7y ago
    Sorry man, I was just referencing joker from the dark knight for humour :-/
geofft 7y ago
I wonder if it is sufficient to fire the people at Google who work on AMP. Is management actually invested in AMP enough to re-staff it, or are they merely okay with it?

decentralizer 7y ago

By creating a extension which blocks AMP, for ourselves. But, if we really need to destroy AMP from internet. Unfortunately it is not really possible, unless if you have enough money to buy Google.

zzzcpan 7y ago
Probably the only useful way to fight Google is to promote non-Google controlled web browsers with adblockers.
tedmiston 7y ago
Seems like a reasonable solution on desktops, but where I see AMP the most is on mobile. I don't think it's possible to block AMP in Safari on iOS.
- decentralizer 7y ago
  Actually it is possible. It doesn't have to done on client-side. You can do it via DNS settings with Pi-Hole on your network, or create your own private tunnel with Pi-Hole. After that, you need to block subdomains with amp.. Or even you can create your own iOS app for it, and yes it is also possible.
  - tedmiston 7y ago
    Great idea. Do you have more info on how this can be done with the Pi-hole? I have been wanting to set one up already anyway.

djflutt3rshy 7y ago

Reduce the demand for it. Include easily accessible "article only" mode, make your site friendly to current Reader Modes for all major browsers. No obtrusive ads, no 500 trackers bogging down the browser. Quick loading. Just give us the info we need, nothing more. Just like ad blockers were a response to websites not respecting people's attention and safety, likewise AMP is a response to them not respecting people's time.

buboard 7y ago
I m more wary about google ranking amp pages higher. I m not sure if amp is a response
untog 7y ago
All of that would be awesome, but it won't kill AMP. AMP isn't popular because users love it. It's popular because Google shows AMP-only results for the first screen (often two or more screens) of search results on their site. You can make as beautiful an experience as you want, but users won't see it when they search, so they won't ever get to experience it.
- jotm 7y ago
  I haven't seen an AMP page in over 2 years, and I use Google search a lot. Anytime I saw one I clicked away in disgust, so maybe they're filtered for me. The problem is all the people and big websites that don't seem to care at all about their own content pushing amp as some sort of great solution for website speed. Sad, but it seems to have died down.
  - adventured 7y ago
    AMP results are persistently - as in, without exception - at the top of all results for any search that has an active news event attached to it. Right now nine of the first ten results for "Walmart shooting" in incognito mode stock Chrome on Android, are AMP articles. Do that search, if you're not seeing those AMP articles then you're doing something very unusual with your setup.

nudpiedo 7y ago

You can lobby against it in the same fashion there was a small campaign against infinite scrolling portals. Also you can create an extension for yourself which rewrites the URL and opens the slow version of the same page. At the end everyone is free, for the good or for the bad.

PaulHoule 7y ago

(1) The political attack: Google is increasingly coming under fire for being a monopolist. Such attacks could lead to the demise of or restrictions being put on AMP. (2) The technical attack: kill the web as we know it. The idea here is that the web is hopelessly corrupted by the entanglement of text with code (e.g. Javascript,) the advertising-based business model, pop-ups, etc. A particular sign of this is "scanning" behavior where you go to Google News or Hacker News or your round of daily blogs and hit "reload" to see what is new. This has multiple insidious effects on the human nervous system, one is that some of your attention is used to suppress content that you've seen before, which lowers your working IQ. It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.

krapp 7y ago
>It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc. Your cure is worse than the disease. At the moment, I can choose to use AMP or not, can choose to use Javascript or not, and can choose to publish whatever I like to the web, and whomever wants to can read it. Your solution would appear to require me to only publish static documents which are "new, interesting, non-toxic, etc," under some arbitrary and proprietary guidelines, because that's all people would (or should) be allowed to see. No thank you. I'd rather have freedom from all of the gatekeepers of web culture, be they FAANG or contrarian hackers.
buboard 7y ago
Be careful with that thinking. The web is truly open (thank you TBL). Any other ‘smart’ app platform is a golden chain ( well , silver or aluminum, depending on app sales)
zzo38computer 7y ago
"I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc" NNTP at least you can scan what is new, and other criteria you can program yourself (it can't automatically know what is interesting, so you will have to program in your own criteria for that).

martin_a 7y ago

I think eliminating the demand is the ultimate way. The "promise" of AMP is fast delivery of the page and ease of use on mobile devices. Once we (as in "content creators" or whatever) start building our sites that way, AMP will get used less and less.

donohoe 7y ago
And that has started. Checkout ThoughtCo from DotDash https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-equations-4157661 https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-equations... http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba97be25433862/ http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba... One side-effect is AMP now provides a reason not to do anything about your regular crappy pages.
- martin_a 7y ago
  Big thumbs up! Looks great on mobile and works very well. I think I will drop them a line and congratulate them later on their efforts. Maybe others should do so, too.
jotm 7y ago
Even if your website isn't up to the ridiculous speed standards of some tests, do yourself a favour and remove AMP. Your content and website are more important than 2 seconds shaved off the load speed. And start using smarter monetising techniques, not just stupid PPV/PPC ads.
buboard 7y ago
> Once we (as in "content creators" or whatever) start building our sites that way, AMP will get used less and less That is the sad part and why it needs to die - it won't stop. Google prioritizes their own system regardless of your work.
- thephyber 7y ago
  They aren't mutually exclusive, though. Even if AMP died, if reading / clicking thru to your web site is a bad experience (slow loads, lots of ads, autoplay of video that's unrelated to the article, clickbait links loaded by partners, etc) these are all friction against users returning and weigh on your site's reputation. If all of the players in the space use the same tactics, users will gladly migrate towards lower friction environments.

haasted 7y ago

Add an option in adblocking software that automatically redirects to the real article. I imagine there’s a fairly big overlap between users of adblocking software and users that dislike amp.

starbugs 7y ago

To me it looks as if AMP is on the edge of being legal in terms of antitrust law. Even if Google doesn't admit to it, I bet they prefer AMPed sites in the ranking. The AMP icon might be another thing that makes it difficult with regard to legal considerations. This might be one of its major weaknesses.

tyingq 7y ago

There's a fair amount of interest in the US Congress to entertain antitrust conversation around Google, Facebook, etc. Find some way to get a charismatic US Senator spun up about AMP.

tyingq 7y ago
Not personally recommended, but... AMP pages are hosted on a google.com uri. Get some kind of controversial content up on an AMP page, and start a grassroots "OMG, Google is hosting this bad content via AMP" campaign going with some tech-ignorant group. Maybe works better if AMP is fronting some other Google controlled user-content domain.
- buboard 7y ago
  We could probably push to categorize google.com as spam/dangerous

EwanToo 7y ago

I've switched to bing search as an experiment, that's basically how you kill AMP

buboard 7y ago
i use bing and yandex for my image searches every time. google images is rubbish
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Unfortunately Bing also implements AMP. :/

deweller 7y ago

Can you give me a high level overview of what your motivation is for destroying AMP? I'm not trying to troll. I really would like to know.

buboard 7y ago
I don't, but i am asking how it can be done. I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem
- krapp 7y ago
  >I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem How would it be unstoppable? Google isn't a government. They don't own or control the web, nor do they have the force of law or men with guns pointed at web developers, forcing them to use AMP. It's no more likely to "seize the entire web" than ActiveX or Silverlight.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > They don't own or control the web, Really? name a long tail website that doesn't SEO for google
    - krapp 7y ago
      Not every site on the web is a business that's concerned with SEO... and claiming that Google controls the visibility of online businesses is not a claim that they control the web. And they don't even really control the visibility of online businesses, so much as have outsized influence over it. It's possible to run a business and not be the first search result on Google, and other search engines do exist, as well as other venues for advertisement and promotion.
      - buboard 7y ago
        you didn't name one though

the_duke 7y ago

No-one has mentioned the to me most obvious answer: if your employer wants to/is using AMP, heavily lobby against it. Convince other developers. Get your manager on your side. Write the CEO. Do so with good arguments why it's a bad move, not with "omg Google is evil". Do the same thing as a user: if you are using a site that has AMP deployed, write them. Them them why it's bad for them and for their users, and how this pushes you to other alternatives.

lonelappde 7y ago
That requires having a reason to oppose AMP beyond generalized dislike of Google.
- donohoe 7y ago
  Start with this http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    The very first reason it gives is nonsense. Your boss will probably laugh at you if not fire you. "AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google." No, it keeps users within the link aggregator's domain, whether that is Google, Bing, Baidu, or a link aggregator made by a third party. The publisher is OK with this because it makes loading from all of those link aggregators instant, just like when they publish for Apple News; but in this case, they can publish once and support multiple aggregators.
    - donohoe 7y ago
      As someone who works for publishers, no, we were not happy about this at all and it did pull readers from our sites.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago

The reason why we have AMP in the first place is that normal news websites are unusable. The extra caching/preloading it enables is a bonus, but the main benefit comes from AMP websites not being as shitty as regular sits. It's pretty easy to make usable web sites with regular HTML, and it's almost certainly possible to make just as shitty AMP sites. However, AMP solved the political/bureaucratic problem by providing a strong carrot to make a non-shitty version of the web site, and made it easier to make a non-shitty one than a shitty one. The publishers already have to spend time remaking their web site, and the goal they get provided with is "keep it simple and lightweight", and doing shitty things is made hard/expensive. So they grumble and do it, getting it mostly right. (Although they seem to have realized the "potential" and started shittifying the AMP pages too). They could have a normal experience that is very similar. Yet, they still serve the non-AMP, ad- and tracker-laden main page that takes 20x as long to load, jumps around while doing so, and tries to blast you with an autoplaying video that remains stuck to your screen while you scroll. I don't get the hate for AMP - it somehow succeeded in the impossible quest to get publishers to make less shitty web sites, and it does improve user experience by preloading the pages. It's just like with the "acceptable ads" program - some web sites participating in it serve significantly less shitty ads to people who only allow "acceptable ads", while serving a worse version _of the same ad_ to everyone else. So maybe, to answer your question: Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser. Much harder to do and unlikely to get enough momentum/incentive to actually succeed, though.

buboard 7y ago
Or, make a service to convert those unusable news sites to tolerable.
- pvorb 7y ago
  No need for a service. Firefox comes with readability, Safari has reader mode.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

SimonPStevens 7y ago

AMP itself is not the problem. It is actual one possible solution to the problem of heavy slow pages. The problem is that it is tied to Google. We don't need to destroy it, we need to make it into an open standard that all browsers and search engines can implement for the same benefits.

lonelappde 7y ago
Done. amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amphtml/
- tyingq 7y ago
  An open standard that includes rules like "your page must include this Google controlled JS url which will contain whatever we want". That pretty much kills the "open" bit.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Agree, but technically if the spec is well-defined browsers can recognize that JS URL as a magic string instead of actually loading that JS, sorta like how browsers don't actually go to w3c.org when they see an HTML 4.01 doctype. Perhaps the right place is to lobby the WHATWG for an explicit exception in the definition of the script tag to handle these ampproject.org URLs in an API-compatible way.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      If you don't load the js, the amp specific tags don't work. So, for example, no images.
      - geofft 7y ago
        I mean that browsers should implement support for the AMP-specific tags directly, without needing to load the JS to do so. If the AMP spec is complete, then this should theoretically be possible.

donohoe 7y ago

The whole marketing aspect behind AMP is that its fast. This is the narrative that has sucked most publishers in. It is also not true (to the degree you think). I run a leaderboard of major news publishes (mostly English language based ones). It relies on WebPageTest.org and tests about 60+ articles pages nightly on 3G and 'Fast 3G' speeds. The myth that you cannot have a fast web page AND have ads on it is a myth. Several organizations do it and do it well (DotDash dominates the board with their sites). https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ Before I hit API limits on WPT I was also testing against the AMP version of the page too. The speed differences between the regular page load and the AMP page load was often very similar. I recall in some cases (Quartz, Guardian, NYT) that regular pages loaded faster than AMP. That aside, assuming a regular web page took 10 seconds to load (a top 10 article) you would expect that the AMP page would be faster, say down to 2 or 3 seconds in Load Time in order to make the effort of having yet another template/format to support and to justify the effort to re-implement analytics, pay-wall, and ads? Very often it was the a saving of only a second or two. It all adds up, but as someone who works with resource strapped publishes thats not worth the resources. Thats especially true when I could have spent all that time optimizing our regular pages instead of this other project. Why do people think AMP is faster? Pre-caching by Google. The thing is Google (IMHO) could pre-cache regular web pages too. They don't. They don't even issue guidelines on how to make your site cache friendly, they insist on this whole specification/implementation and insist on hosting it remotely and create all sorts of barriers.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I have a different take. It's not that you can't do normal HTML as fast as AMP. It's that by preventing a lot of the things that make "normal" sites slow, it changes the whole conversation at publishing companies. For example, here is an example conversation at a web company before AMP (and this is not really hypothetical - I had more than a few conversations like this): Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page. Developers: But that will kill page performance! Marketers: But you guys are smart, make it work! And after AMP: Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page. Developers: Get bent. AMP doesn't allow that, and without AMP our SEO positioning will tank. Marketers: Oh, OK.

donohoe 7y ago

Start with this http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/ "We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web." https://github.com/amp-letter/amp-letter.github.io https://github.com/amp-letter/amp-letter.github.io

nairobi222 7y ago

siriniok 7y ago

"Let's build sites that don't require AMP." *gets thrown out of the window*

zzo38computer 7y ago

If you make many web pages that do not require JavaScript, CSS, and many images or videos, then that also improves the speed, and is better for accessibility. For other cases you do need some scripts and stuff, I have suggested a "widget" attribute nd <widget> element. Both <script> and <widget> elements support the widget attribute. If recognized by the browser and enabled by the user, then the element and its contents are replaced by something implementation-dependent (and not necessarily representable in normal HTML). Otherwise, a <widget> element acts like <span>. This also improves speed, as it can skip loading a script if it has its own version, and possibly also use a native code version specific to the browser or an extension. It also allows better user customization, for example if a special text editing widget is used on the web page (rather than a normal <textbox>), then it can be replaced with one that has vi or emacs key bindings, or to implement it without animations if the user wants to implement that script without animations. The other alternative, for stuff that doesn't need HTML and HTTP, is to use Gopher. Then, no need to consider what kind of user interface is used and any other kind of accessibility; it already is!

nosmokearea 7y ago

Propagandists from Google (lonelappde with his teammates) are already here and try to convince other people how good AMP and Google are...

snek 7y ago

You're asking the wrong question. AMP isn't bad, Google ranking AMP pages over equally-fast non-AMP pages is bad. But Google's main goal here is to preload/render content without the content knowing it is being preloaded, so that the page appears to load instantly when the user clicks on it. What I think actually needs to happen is a standard for deferred navigation where the UA can be told to load a bunch of resources and then choose one of them to actually navigate to (basically what AMP does). The problem here is that Google is (as we type here) actively coming up with horrible standards like signed exchanges so that they never have to send users away from their own domain, so I don't think they would be fans of a standardized system that killed AMP.

shkkmo 7y ago
> AMP isn't bad, No, it is clearly bad. You seem to even agree. The stated reason for creating AMP may be good, but the technology and standard itself is bad.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Like all things this is not as black and white as you'd think. AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice and I totally get the flip side of why people think it's dangerous.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    > AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice It is? What do you like about it? What does it help you do more easily? AMP is in no way necessary to build "user-first" fast loading pages. AMP was created to allow aggregators to ensure they could cache and serve content without the user leaving the portal. As publishers are desperate for the traffic, they have adopted AMP to make the aggregators happy. The user is never given a choice, they just end up stuck with a cached AMP page and confused about how to reach the publisher's real website. This "user-first" framework is really more "user-last"
Element_ 7y ago
I think a better solution would be for Google to heavily demote pages with slow load times, popup banners, notifications, etc... It would incentivize authors to deliver clean/fast pages while still leaving them freedom to design pages any way they want.

lttlrck 7y ago

Maybe stop using google and other search engines that prioritize AMP in the results. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and don’t miss google at all.

epistasis 7y ago
This is what I do and I love it. In order to avoid the AMP experience I had to stop using google web search, and it turned out that I can't tell the difference in results anyway. Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ is a nice little addon when I have to do a search on Google.
- thephyber 7y ago
  > you'll be tracked far less Citation needed. Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web. I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.
  - ldh 7y ago
    You don't search the web using news sites.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites. I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything. Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains. The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search. If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.

tambourine_man 7y ago

As a user, I go to the trouble of clicking the original link after entering an AMP site. Not much because I think it will make a dent in the access statistics, but because I really hate the experience. As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do, but that's something we could have a hand on changing collectively.

blahblahblogger 7y ago
> As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do Agreed. The company I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it. As such money does speak louder and if the users of our product are engaging with it more because of AMP, why would we go against it? Philosophical reasons aren't enough. To give people and companies a reason to oppose AMP you'd need to frame the reasons in a way that includes business considerations.
- api 7y ago
  What value are they getting other than being ranked higher?
  - mosen 7y ago
    That’s an extremely compelling reason in itself.
- buboard 7y ago
  > I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it. Do you have an idea how are they monetizing the extra traffic. And how much more traffic is it? If google is strongarming people to use amp, isnt that fundamentally breaking net neutrality?

dccoolgai 7y ago

Conspiracy theory: most of the problems AMP solves were already solved by Google Reader, but it was hard to sell ads on that... so they killed it 2/3 years before introducing AMP to beg the solution and swoop in with AMP.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

You can’t because “everyone else is using it, so we can’t be the only ones not” style thinking.

enriquto 7y ago

Maybe not the easiest, but certainly the most elegant way, is to social engineer the whole society to make "google-free" a really cool thing.

api 7y ago

Make a browser extension to de-amp links?

rhexs 7y ago
If only this was possible on Safari mobile.
- thephyber 7y ago
  You can always buy a Google phone to get away from AMP...

ampthrowaway5 7y ago

Disclaimer: I will be joining Google in a few weeks, opinions are obviously my own. Anon account because I don't know where I stand yet in this regard. I'm one of the few people who doesn't have too much of a problem with AMP (obvious bias aside). Take this advice AMP devs who might be reading: Listen to the community, and communicate back without being condescending. A bit of humility goes a long way. Your developer marketing over AMP is awful and you need to fix it. Not working with the tech community is causing immeasurable damage to the AMP/Google brand for the people who want to work at your company (engineers) who feel personally attacked by this. Be careful. http://ampletter.org http://ampletter.org

nwienert 7y ago
If amp didn’t run things with the header on googles servers it would immediately stop being critiqued. Here’s a ridiculously frustrating example of how it ruins the web experience I ran into yesterday: I was looking for supplements, searching google with something like “site:reddit.com best supplement site”. Google directs you to amp reddit. All good so far. So you find a thread full of links in comments. You scroll down and click one and it takes you off reddit. Good. Now you swipe back. What happens? You lose your scroll position entirely. In a huge reddit thread full of links you literally are re-scrolling the page over and over as you try different ones. It completely breaks the web. From the company that literally should be the champion of the web. It’s so backwards and hostile to the platform it’s hard to fathom what they are thinking. Amp could easily achieve all its goals by not forcing that stupid frame, and by letting it be hosted anywhere (google can monitor if they are using a decent CDN based on simple heuristics).
buboard 7y ago
Your employer should move AMP widgets into the browser , completely scrap the google CDN from it, and stop prioritizing amp pages.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  This seems like an anti-trust issue.

SamWhited 7y ago

If you're a U.S. voter, vote for Elizabeth Warren (https://elizabethwarren.com/ https://elizabethwarren.com/) in the Democratic primary and then in 2020. She's pledged to break up companies that abuse their position as both the platform and the product. Once we have a congress and executive branch that are amenable to actually enforcing anti-trust laws in office, then make your case that allowing Google to operate AMP servers and prioritize ranking sites that use it is a bad thing. Without regulation, I'm fairly convinced the big tech companies will continue to find ways to abuse their power.

buboard 7y ago
At best, google will break out of alphabet. The problem remains. Warren is indeed the most likely to fight google's dominance, but i m afraid regulation will only make it worse for their competitors.
- SamWhited 7y ago
  What I'm most hoping she tries to do is break Android out of Google. Google owning the app store and forcing their products onto peoples phones with magical root powers that other apps don't have is one of the bigger problems I have with Android and its ecosystem. But we'll see; fingers crossed that the political will exists to actually do something and that she can leverage it.

pknight 7y ago

I would urge people to tell Matt Mullenweg and core WordPress developers that they don't want AMP in WordPress core. Since WordPress runs on >30% of the web, if WP adopts it, it will make the choice for most of the web that websites must shape themselves in the way Google wants it. Google is currently doing a stellar job penetrating WordPress and using its increasing influence to support its own business interests.

Animats 7y ago
Probably the most effective move that can be made right now. Affects a huge number of sites. Challenge for WordPress: make it work faster without AMP than with AMP.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  How can you make something faster than prerendered?
  - pcmaffey 7y ago
    Prerender it. Should be table stakes for sites nowadays.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Well. You can’t prerender a BGP announcement at your ISPs border. So your locally cached prerendered version on -insert some random ISP here- will always be slower than google in 99% of the cases. Been competing against google since 2005, I’ve seen a thing or two.
      - pcmaffey 7y ago
        For sure you're not going to be faster than google. But if you're site is > 3x slower than AMP, people will notice and prefer AMP. The point is to stay competitive.
    - 7y ago

pornel 7y ago

Kill the adtech/surveillance industry. AMP is an admission that the open Web has failed. The number of trackers, tag managers, popups and other crap to "monetize" pages has gone out of control and made majority of pages painful to open (at least without some crap filter, like an adblocker — or AMP). If you manage to restore the health of the open Web, it'll be hard to sell a walled garden instead.

gruturo 7y ago

Write to Apple and plead the case properly, framing it as a privacy/tracking issue, which it is. They recently took a lot of steps to safeguard users’ privacy. If they kill it by embedding a de-amp’er in safari, the incentive and ROI to keeping amp pages drops quite a bit. Help your Android-using acquaintances set up Firefox.

Ayesh 7y ago
I'm pretty sure you Google can sue Apple if they add a de-AMP feature to Safari on anti competitive grounds.

lvs 7y ago

I love how you all just walked blithely right into the open jaws of this. Naysayers just a year or two ago were getting downvoted to hell on here. Now you've gotten the taste of the acid in the first stomach, and you think there's a way to climb back out. You don't seem to be grasping monopolistic companies as the ruminants they are.

chrischen 7y ago

To kill it you need to propose s truly open alternative that also honestly addresses some of the reasons why Google wants AMP to exist, without ceding control to Google. This probably means some system or voluntary limit on JS/HTML that can ensure fast loading. If anyone were to propose this it’d probably be Bing or DDG.

buboard 7y ago
limit javascript to 640K of memory. so easy to implement and would fix most sites. Some other things like custom fonts could be removed from mobile browsers. The rest should be OK - 2 or 3 more seconds to load a page are not important really. After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial.
- chrischen 7y ago
  > After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial. But finding the right article to read may require browsing through many pages, and after dozens those seconds can add up. Also the solution cannot be to restrict all JS and web pages. It needs to be an open and opt-in framework.
  - buboard 7y ago
    i d be fine with some restriction to JS. Heavy JS pages are bad for the environment and disrespectful of the time of users.

bdarnell 7y ago

Don't destroy it, embrace it. AMP is the low-javascript web many of us pine for. If browsers implemented AMP natively (and it were properly standardized), it would be great, and it has tons of potential for things like RSS readers. Google's heavy-handedness here has a lot of problems, but if they've managed to get publishers on board with a move away from the JS quagmire we should be pushing in the same direction and not fighting against it.

buboard 7y ago
embrace something else. It would be lovely if it was implemented natively, disentangled from google, and without google strongarming websites to their own implementation and CDN. They didnt win publishers because of their wonderful implementation, they are literally blackmailing them with deranking if they don't (I suppose I could use a carrot analogy but i m more suspicious) There is so much evil that can happen if AMP becomes the de facto walled garden of the web. I imagine if that happens, then we 'll end up needing google's review before websites can even be reachable. Or a government could order google to effectively shut down a bunch of sites instantly. The current version of amp is worthy of destruction before it grows to become indestructible
the8472 7y ago
AMP still includes javascript that does many retarded things, including hiding the site contents until the JS is loaded, often from 3rd party CDNs. So if you're blocking the amp JS then the site just shows a blank screen, until some CSS animation trickery blends it in a few seconds later. In other words if you use a content blocker AMP can be slower than the page would be without it.
- gregable 7y ago
  AMP hides the entire page to avoid what is known as a Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC). The document unhides as soon as a single AMP javascript resource loads, or an 8s timeout if that fails. That javascript is very cacheable and is often already in the browser cache to begin with.

Waterluvian 7y ago

An important (but not the only) point to consider when answering this question: STOP expecting consumers to give a crap about nerdspeak topics or to care about hypothetical dystopian futures. Almost all users don't know or care about AMP. They just want stuff to load fast.

OldHand2018 7y ago

Why would you want to destroy AMP? AMP is Google's attempt to become the next Compuserve. Just keep doing your own thing and let Google turn itself into a platform for idiots.

cced 7y ago
So that another company can replace them?

notatoad 7y ago

It's easy: convince a huge majority of the publications that produce actual content people want to read to start making their websites fast, lightweight, and cacheable. Then there will be no need for AMP. Until you can accomplish that, destroying amp will only make the internet worse.

xvector 7y ago
I would rather have slightly slower websites than Google control even more of the web.
- notatoad 7y ago
  Yeah, but you aren't everybody. That attitude doesn't accomplish anything. Google gains control by finding problems and solving them their way. You can't gain that control back by dismissing those problems. if you want to reduce Google's control you have to solve a problem (that affects other people, not just you) before they do, or in a better way than they can.
  - xvector 7y ago
    I don't really agree here. Solving a problem has never been justification for a solution that brings even more. For example, an totalitarian dictatorship would solve a ton of problems with the US political system today. But that doesn't make it an acceptable solution. When your solution brings more harm than it resolves, it's better not to have it in the first place.

mancerayder 7y ago

Come up with a news aggregation service that's not necessarily Apple news to compete with news.google? Does this require lawyers and negotiations with publishers? Sincerely, news addict

magoon 7y ago

AMP can be great for us, if they would fix the implementation.

clircle 7y ago

Stupid question. I have been using Google Search on my work computer for the past year or so, but I haven't seen any changes to any of the sites I've visited. I use firefox with ublock origin everywhere. Do either of these prevent AMP from loading? or is it so subtle that I don't notice it?

dingo_bat 7y ago
Amp is for mobile.