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Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google? Does that fact alone make it faster? If

Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google? Does that fact alone make it faster? If so, are we as a community okay with this imperialist strategy by Google? And prerendering is absolutely viable and in practice all over the place apart from AMP. Here's Chrome's own docs on it: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerender https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerend... Is the AMP-specific prerendering another abuse of Google's position despite them using the technology elsewhere? It just seems like this is not technology specific, but prioritization of tech created by a giant company that owns nearly everything and must own more.

jasode 7y ago
>Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets I'm not an expert but Google AMP is not a simple CDN cache. The Google-owned servers also proxies API calls to whitelisted urls like approved ad networks and Google Analytics. (Expand all the triangles in the list: https://amp.dev/support/faq/platform-and-vendor-partners/ https://amp.dev/support/faq/platform-and-vendor-partners/) A cache service like Cloudflare CDN doesn't do that. (Although there's an example of somebody trying Cloudflare's new "Workers" functionality to proxy an api call on the server side instead of the browser side: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/google-analytics-proxy-worker/90202 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/google-analytics-proxy-wo...) For publishers that use ad networks, Google's AMP is a different value proposition from a typical CDN. Because Google's AMP has a different technical architecture, it solves a different problem than a CDN. Yes, Cloudflare could conceivably add more functionality to their service to proxy ad network api calls like Google AMP but it wouldn't buy them as much of a speed boost because Cloudflare doesn't own/control the "google.com" domain that serves search results. It's "www.google.com" that has Google's trusted javascript code to preload AMP data that is executed on the user's web browser.
- gregable 7y ago
  This is a misunderstanding. Browser requests to ad and analytics networks are never proxied by the AMP Cache. They are made directly from your browser to the vendors listed. You can verify this in network tools. The AMP Cache proxies: AMP Pages, images, fonts. That's pretty much it, since those are all that's needed for prerendering.
jsnell 7y ago
> Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google? Yes, it's substantially different, since the purpose of Google's AMP cache is to serve pages linked to from a Google origin. Google has to know which search query you entered to render the results page, so prefetching some of the actual results doesn't leak any information. If you prefetch from arbitrary domains, you leak information about people making a search to those domains, even if they don't click through. (And likewise for other entities that are running their own AMP caches, for links hosted on their own origins.) That's very clearly the actual technical problem being solved; if you set out to solve the problem of privacy-preserving prefetching of search results with the tech from 5 years ago, you'll inevitably end up with something like AMP. > Does that fact alone make it faster? If so, are we as a community okay with this imperialist strategy by Google? Irrelevant, since you're basing both of these questions on inaccurate assumptions.
- kadoban 7y ago
  Doesn't Google share information with site owners about the searches that include that site anyway?

jasode 7y ago

>Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets I'm not an expert but Google AMP is not a simple CDN cache. The Google-owned servers also proxies API calls to whitelisted urls like approved ad networks and Google Analytics. (Expand all the triangles in the list: https://amp.dev/support/faq/platform-and-vendor-partners/ https://amp.dev/support/faq/platform-and-vendor-partners/) A cache service like Cloudflare CDN doesn't do that. (Although there's an example of somebody trying Cloudflare's new "Workers" functionality to proxy an api call on the server side instead of the browser side: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/google-analytics-proxy-worker/90202 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/google-analytics-proxy-wo...) For publishers that use ad networks, Google's AMP is a different value proposition from a typical CDN. Because Google's AMP has a different technical architecture, it solves a different problem than a CDN. Yes, Cloudflare could conceivably add more functionality to their service to proxy ad network api calls like Google AMP but it wouldn't buy them as much of a speed boost because Cloudflare doesn't own/control the "google.com" domain that serves search results. It's "www.google.com" that has Google's trusted javascript code to preload AMP data that is executed on the user's web browser.

gregable 7y ago
This is a misunderstanding. Browser requests to ad and analytics networks are never proxied by the AMP Cache. They are made directly from your browser to the vendors listed. You can verify this in network tools. The AMP Cache proxies: AMP Pages, images, fonts. That's pretty much it, since those are all that's needed for prerendering.

jsnell 7y ago

> Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google? Yes, it's substantially different, since the purpose of Google's AMP cache is to serve pages linked to from a Google origin. Google has to know which search query you entered to render the results page, so prefetching some of the actual results doesn't leak any information. If you prefetch from arbitrary domains, you leak information about people making a search to those domains, even if they don't click through. (And likewise for other entities that are running their own AMP caches, for links hosted on their own origins.) That's very clearly the actual technical problem being solved; if you set out to solve the problem of privacy-preserving prefetching of search results with the tech from 5 years ago, you'll inevitably end up with something like AMP. > Does that fact alone make it faster? If so, are we as a community okay with this imperialist strategy by Google? Irrelevant, since you're basing both of these questions on inaccurate assumptions.

kadoban 7y ago
Doesn't Google share information with site owners about the searches that include that site anyway?