24 ms·

Fight back against Google AMP (2018)

895 points by mancerayder 7y ago

JohnFen 7y ago
This is an excellent essay. I strongly dislike AMP pages, and I avoid them. The essay touches on many of the reasons why. Any sites that were entirely in AMP are sites I would not be using.
pkamb 7y ago
Reddit already has a fast, mobile-first site that looks almost exactly like the AMP site. Why do they put up with AMP and all of its annoyances? On a site where half the appeal is in features such as upvoting that are incompatible with AMP! It must be only for the supposed SEO benefits?
kaycebasques 7y ago
I know that AMP is an intensely controversial topic, but I have to provide a counterpoint here because I don't think the web developer community fully appreciates the real state of the web on mobile: > How many of you think that the amount of time spent on the mobile web as a fraction of total time on device has increased in the last five years? ... it's well below 7% and in a lot of markets it's falling. We have pretty good telemetry inside of Google and what it tells us is that the web is not essential to the future of computing on mobile. The Mobile Web: MIA, Alex Russell, https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s The gist of his argument is that history suggests that when computing platforms drop below 13% of usage (or perhaps it was 10%, I don't remember the specific number), the platform is in a death spiral. In my 5 years in Web DevRel at Google, I've never heard "it makes the web easier to index" as the main motivation for AMP, I've actually never heard it as a motivation at all. Maybe it is a motivator. The argument definitely makes sense. But I've not heard indexing as a motivator, not even in passing. As a Googler involved in the web I know that I'm inherently biased and everything I say is likely to be written off, but I'm being 100% transparent with you here. There's a lot of people that care about the open web within Google and see it as the best platform for a lot of the same ideological reasons that you all probably love the web. The open web enthusiasts consider the real competition to be: the web versus whatever other platforms are dominant on the computing devices of the future (right now, that's iOS and Android on mobile devices). AMP is a strategy to incentivize websites to provide user experiences on par with whatever else is out there. Disclosures: Googler in the "Web DevRel" team. FWIW we don't report to AMP. So my understanding of AMP may not actually align with the AMP team's. Note that I'm not even saying here whether I think AMP is the right approach to tackle the web's big problem, but I do understand why some people felt AMP is necessary right now. This post is definitely my own personal opinion and doesn't even represent Web DevRel's opinion. I may in fact get in trouble for speaking out about this ;)
meditativeape 7y ago
As a user, I do find AMP pages load faster than canonical pages and provide a more consistent experience across sites. I wonder if publishers that put resources into building AMPs see increased traffic to their website? If so, that's a win-win situation.
GuB-42 7y ago
Google AMP is bad, but I think publishers got what they deserved, at least most of them. When AMP was launched, news sites were horrible. Bloated, buggy, unintuitive, with intrusive ads all over the place and barely functional on mobile. Something needed to be done. Unfortunately for the open web, the one to find a solution was Google, and it turn a real need for a better user experience into a way to control the web. And what comforts me in this idea is that many articles criticizing AMP do it for all the wrong reasons. Publishers want to add whatever bloat feature and complain that AMP don't let them do it. Guys, that's the part of AMP the world really needs. Complain about the Google bits, not about the efficiency improvement it brings. Now, if you take a look at AMP, there are actually two parts. One is a very sensible set of rules for making efficient websites, the other is a big blob of JS with plenty of Google stuff inside, as well as a few functions that help you follow said rules. You want AMP to go to hell, simple, follow the relevant rules from AMP, ditch the Google turd of a JS and keep only the good stuff. That way, your website will be even more efficient than the AMP version. Show the world that AMP is not what makes the web faster.
smabie 7y ago
We all know that HTML sucks, but what’s wrong with AMP? I like AMP, I’m forced to pay for each byte I use and 2mb web pages are killing me. The author doesn’t give any technical reason why AMP is bad. And I don’t think that it’s open source but google employees contribute more than anyone else is a good reason: if we are against open source projects that have open source contributors from predominantly one company we should think that Java, Scala, R, Kotlin, Swift, MySQL, ReasonML, Haskell, F#, and much much more are “evil”. In short, I don’t think we can conclude that “AMP can go to hell”.
mattpk 7y ago
Google is also adding AMP to emails: https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/
mfer 7y ago
There are two paths we can take to change this. Some should go down each of the paths. 1. Regulation. People organizing to stop monopolies and cartel behavior like this. 2. Competition. Both in the form of news aggregator systems and search engines. Of these things the only thing I see much action on is the search engines and that's minimal. There are opportunities for action and businesses.
weystrom 7y ago
For firefox there is this extension to protect yourself from AMP: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ Works on mobile too. The downside is that page redirection takes some time.
techslave 7y ago
starts off strong but starts to unravel to a crescendo here: > F#&! you Google, and f#&! the AMP horse you rode in on. followed by arguments about “our web”. by which of course he means advertisers’ web. “our web” would in fact look more like the AMO web. he’s right though. this is an abuse of google’s power.
nej 7y ago
After AMP was introduced, I converted to DDG (DuckDuckGo) and after taking some time getting used to it and personalizing it’s settings, I haven’t gone back to Google.
bad_user 7y ago
On my phone I switched to DuckDuckGo simply because I have no way to disable AMP in search results otherwise.
ptasci67 7y ago
Putting aside the merits of AMP or Google entirely, I find this author's outrage suspicious. It says in Google's message, "this issue will not affect your appearance on search...". There is a false equivalency proposed that Google is strong-arming publishers to switch their entire site to AMP by sending these messages. I am not saying Google is blameless or that AMP is perfect, but reading the author's argument literally, I don't understand why this action is the focus of their outrage. Just ignore it.
tzs 7y ago
I have a page that I put on the web about 13 years ago, that somehow became the top hit for "how to <X>" for a particular <X>. I have never done anything to promote the page, and do not have any ads on it. A few years ago, it lost the #1 spot, but is still on the first page. (I'm specifically not saying what <X> is, or what domain the page is on, because I do not want to do anything that might get people to go there. I want to see how long a simple page with no promotion and no ads can stay on the front page of search). I just noticed that Google says in the search results "Your page is not mobile-friendly". Would that be because I don't have an AMP version of the page? Clicking on that notice goes to a Google tool that analyzes the page for mobile friendliness...which tells me that the page IS mobile friendly, so I'm a bit confused. The page is very simple. Just some paragraphs of text, some h1 and h2 headings, a few tables, and a couple of lists. The only CSS is on the page itself via a <style> tag, and only has one rule, setting the width of th to a certain number of px.
- wolfgang42 7y ago
  You can definitely have pages that Google considers "mobile-friendly" without using AMP. Do you have a viewport meta tag on the page? If you have any CSS at all some mobile browsers will default to a desktop view that requires zooming to read, and that's probably what Google is detecting. Regarding the analyzer tool, I suspect this is a case of Google's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. As I recall, Google is in the process of switching from a static analyzer to a Chrome Lighthouse-based analyzer (or something to that effect) and I'd guess that the mobile-friendly rules are slightly different between the two.
summerlight 7y ago
Personally, I'm okay without AMP if 99.9 percentile latency on the overall mobile web ecosystem was within 2~3 secs. Unfortunately, it's more of 20~30 secs on non-AMP sites, which made me to take an ambivalent stance upon AMP. My ISP is obviously not doing a great job, but it's also a publisher side problem which is nearly un-fixable anytime soon.
baxtr 7y ago
Hell yeah!
scblock 7y ago
I strongly agree. Web developers and app designers should work to build fast, performant web sites that use bandwidth carefully because that's good for end users. But the entire AMP approach to doing this is questionable, and as we have seen over the years it appears to act more like a way to give Google more undeserved and unnecessary control over what should be an open web. More broadly, I consider this yet another reason to avoid using Google properties where possible. They have shown themselves to be bullies and bad actors who want to control the internet and oppose an open web. I recommend simply not building AMP pages at all, but instead working to build high quality, performant websites which gracefully handle device size changes and lack of javascript.
- wrycoder 7y ago
  Yes, it’s one thing to promote a cleaner and faster web though better design and implementation. It’s another thing for Google to use its effectively monopoly power to enforce that. As the FA says, Google didn’t invent the web or create its content - what gives them the moral right to take it over? I think the collective web will eventually fix the problems without Google. The root of the AMP issue is placement in Google’s search engine. Personally, I use DDG, and would be willing to pay a sizable subscription fee to keep it from being more like Google or from being acquired. But, most people probably would not - they are used to the web being “free”. This is just another “embrace, extend, extinguish” effort, like the ones we have seen in the past. These attacks are transparently self-serving and should be “routed around”. It will require commitment to do so!
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > Yes, it’s one thing to promote a cleaner and faster web though better design and implementation. It’s another thing for Google to use its effectively monopoly power to enforce that. AMP is more than just cleaner and faster - it gives Google control. They could discriminate on cleaner and faster without it, but they purposefully don't mention that, since it would undercut the push for AMP.
- alexfromapex 7y ago
  Agreed, it is yet another Google data collection method created under the guise of a beneficial offering
chrshawkes 7y ago
The only thing worse than AMP? Paywalled AMP sites.
mrep 7y ago
Discussed last year with 340 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720
- dang 7y ago
  That was Sept 2018.
  - mrep 7y ago
    Oops, didn't look at the year. Updated
- dang 7y ago
  A related thread from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20754896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20754896
- buboard 7y ago
  another attempt to murder it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599752
chiefalchemist 7y ago
re: "Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles." Actually, that's not quite right. Publishers have forced Google to forced publishers to use AMP. That is, publishers can't control themselves and are adding more and more and more bloat to their pages. I am by no means a Google and/or AMP fan, but the truth is most sites have no respect for the receiving device and/or connection speed.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Neither does Google. They prioritise AMP pages over regular pages, regardless of what the regular page looks like. EDIT: @afiori comments below that this may no longer be the case.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    What does that have to do with respect for receiving device or connection speed?
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      If the respect was for the receiving device or connection speed, the metric used to determine priority of results would be size of payload / speed of delivery, rather than if the technology / hosting was google-owned.
      - afiori 7y ago
        As far as I recall they fixed that, now the problem is that they the measure for speed they use does some weird tricks around partial loads; as long as you display _something_ soon they are happy and the fact that a page might be useless for many seconds is weighted less
        shadowgovt 7y ago
shadowgovt 7y ago
That makes sense. Since AMP is intended to be a more optimized site structure than the average website, pages adhering to the AMP standard should increase the performance of the web on average, whether or not the site actually gets indexed into Google's localized caches. We have HNers complaining about bloated JavaScript pages all the time. Maybe Google has actually found a way to tip the market away from those page designs?
- shkkmo 7y ago
  It would be easy to penalize pages for load time, Google's goal is something different.
- ehnto 7y ago
  If it were just an optional web standard, that might be okay. But it's a system that removes control from webmasters and hands it over to Google, and Google are using their incumbent advantage to coerce you into the AMP system. I can build a site just as fast as AMP without sacrificing the UX of the web itself in the process, and I intend to do so. But there are many businesses jumping on the AMP bandwagon because they think there will be an SEO benefit. As a user, I hate clicking on AMP links by mistake. It's not even clear where you are, is it a website, is it still Google, how do I get to the website from here? Who even served me the content? It says it's from this website, but it wasn't?
  - afiori 7y ago
    I think this is a confused issue as AMP the format is harmless, while AMP the google publishing platform is worrying.
    - ehnto 7y ago
      Yes, the standard is harmless, the way AMP handling is implemented in Google products is the worrying part.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It is an optional web standard. There are other search engines than Google. I can't help but wonder why none of them have thought to start indexing AMP pages (or pages with some other standard or even no standard) in local cache and serve them faster to their users; seems like a space they could choose to compete on.
bil7 7y ago
In the last few years my opinion of Google has gotten worse and worse. I dread to think of what it will look like in 5 or 10 years time.
- brink 7y ago
  There's hope. Microsoft somewhat turned it around after a change in directors.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    The recent changes in Alphabet leadership seem to push it further into AMP like ideas.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    They were pretty much forced to change though
    - indubitably 7y ago
      How so?
      - tinus_hn 7y ago
        Because their traditional extend, embrace, extinguish strategy no longer worked. Windows Phone and Internet Explorer failed and they were losing so much mindshare switching from one failed api to the next. The monopoly was becoming pretty fragile.
dessant 7y ago
EU citizens can submit formal complaints to the European Commission for suspected infringements of competition rules. Here is more information on how to file a complaint: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documents_en.html https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documen... If you believe Google engages in anti-competitive practices with AMP, you have the power to signal these issues, which may result in an investigation. You can also share your concerns with a simple email to comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu. > You can report your concerns by e-mail to comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu. Please indicate your name and address, identify the firms and products concerned and describe the practice you have observed. This will help the Commission to detect problems in the market and be the starting point for an investigation.
- DrJaws 7y ago
  I sent it a complain relating AMP to margrethe vestager over 2 years ago, when this was relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 and they did nothing, I doubt they even study the case, nothing was on the table of the parliament related to this. Google have continued to abuse and will do more if no one stops them. It's important to complain again and again until they step in.
bluetidepro 7y ago
AMP Is ruining mobile web. I cannot stand it. If it was actually made to be fluid, I'd see the value. But it's such a terrible UX, and so janky with the way it "pops in", and messes up "browser back" abilities. Out of all the shitty things Google has ever done, AMP is #1 to me on that list. Orrrrrr just give me a damn option to turn it off, if I want. I will never understand why companies force people into these types of major UX decisions on their behalf. Stop assuming every user is stupid. Sure, make it the default, I don't care about that for the everyday user, but for something as fundamental as the browser, I should have an option to turn off every single Google opinion they bake in.
- john-radio 7y ago
  What is an example of a web site I might have used that breaks the Back button because it uses AMP?
- mcjiggerlog 7y ago
  If you use DuckDuckGo you don't have to deal with AMP at all. Giving it a go on mobile is a good way to see how well it works for you too as searches tend to be less mission-critical compared to desktop-based searches.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    Any good alternative to Google News?
    - jeanofthedead 7y ago
      RSS.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        This is what I did. When the Google News redesign happened, it made Google News substantially less useful to me. Enough so that came up with a replacement. It's not for everyone, as it requires running your own webserver, but I use Tiny Tiny RSS to aggregate the feeds of the various sources I'm interested in, then can read the aggregated feeds (I have multiple, a different feed for each general subject) through the web interface and/or by using an RSS reader. I use an RSS reader (gReader) on my mobile devices to do this.
Kique 7y ago
I love AMP sites that do it the right way, like Politico. Keeps the real domain, loads fast, clean interface. I wish more sites were like this. I think the first version of AMP where the URL was always "google.com/amp/politico/sdgffsdf" was awful but you can now keep the correct domain and I sometimes prefer it to the regular version of a lot of sites. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump-impeachment-next-phase-removal-075013 https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump-impeachme...
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I think the first version of AMP where the URL was always "google.com/amp/politico/sdgffsdf" was awful But that has the advantage of making it easier to find the real page rather than the AMP page.
- tyingq 7y ago
  It's nicer than the original AMP setup, but still awful for publishers. For any user that navigates to your AMP page from a Google search... The publisher gives up the most important piece of screen real estate, and Google highjacks left/right swipes to navigate to your competitors. And, they hijack the back button post swipe too...back equals "back to Google"...not back to the page I swiped from. It is pretty much like early AOL. A semi walled garden. It offers some speed benefit for users, but way more benefit to Google.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    What's the most important piece of screen real estate that they're giving up?
    - tyingq 7y ago
      The top. Top left is red hot on any heatmap that tracks eyeball movement. Google controls what goes there.
- buboard 7y ago
  is this served from politico's servers and how is it different from a stripped down version of their site?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vxNsr 7y ago
I'm really not looking forward to the google web...
- processing 7y ago
  Where every "website" is an app in the Google App store. Google will serve ads automatically as freemium app (no code required - just agree) or be able to process subscription fees via Google pay and own the eco systems (Chrome, Android, Chromebook, Strada).
- rjmunro 7y ago
  Real people aren't moving to Firefox or Brave, they are moving (or have moved) to the Facebook mobile app. It has instant articles, (https://instantarticles.fb.com/ https://instantarticles.fb.com/) an amp-like lightweight way to load news stories, all hidden inside Facebook's system. Don't worry about searching for news, Facebook will just give you whatever it feels like. Then there's Apples iOS only "News" app. Who knows how that works. AMP is clearly a far more open competitor to the above. It is saving news publishers from themselves.
  - johnward 7y ago
    The facebook articles are worse than amp. The pages get broken halfway through the article and don't load the rest of the content for me.
mopsi 7y ago
AMP made me switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ars 7y ago
I totally understand the issue raised by this article. But I have a problem: I like AMP because it is so fast! Publishers have done this to themselves by loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts that slow it down to almost unusable levels. Maybe if publishers stopped doing that, then you could start criticizing AMP. "Some of my clients will ask me what to do with those messages. I will tell them to delete them. Ignore Google’s nudging, pay no heed." And then your clients will be unhappy with the traffic results. Are you going to also tell your clients the drawbacks?
- misterdoubt 7y ago
  The people criticizing AMP are not necessarily the same people "loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts."
- RonanTheGrey 7y ago
  It's kind of a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" type of thing. Google had the option of simply highly ranking pages that are performant and lightweight on mobile. They didn't take that option, instead they went with AMP. There's intent there. I'm not going to speculate on the intent, because it isn't relevant: the point is that because there was a simpler technical solution available that they didn't take, there is clearly intent in going the harder path. It's worth asking what that means. AMP provides all the benefits that a well-built, well-architected site would, and that would have been the "non-evil" option. Use web standards and push people to respect them, imagine that...
tantalor 7y ago
Mods: [2018]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cryptoquick 7y ago
I don't know why people get so bent out of shape over what Google does. They'll just cancel it in two years. ;) In all seriousness, though, I've been on the "screw google" train for a while. Everything good hey do they throw away (Google Code, Google Reader, Google Plus, Google Inbox, Google Wave... pours one out for OT while I work on my CRDTs) while anything they make which originally held merit they just make more awful, year after year. I don't know if they're aware just how unsustainable a business model screwing over their users might be, but I'm guessing they're willing to find out.
mancerayder 7y ago
I posted this after googling something along the lines of 'firefox mobile turn off autoplay amp' and coming across this article which was a fun hate read. For some reason it manages to sneak past autoplay disabling? How?
rjmunro 7y ago
Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? It's literally impossible to use. Popups flying all over the place, unwanted advertising videos loading, megabytes of tracking JS loaded etc. AMP is forcing publishers to make sites people can actually use.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  Yes? The Guardian, all the time? And... it's fine?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? Yes, but I don't have any of those issues. A decent web browser fixes those problems.
- nwallin 7y ago
  Use an ad blocker. Boom, problem solved.
- laurent123456 7y ago
  I use duckduckgo with Firefox so I never see any AMP website and it works fine. Firefox allows you to have an ad-blocker though so it makes a difference. It's all about choice, but if you want to use a Google search engine with a Google browser then indeed you probably have to browse the web the Google way.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  Yes. A news site, any news site, around 2014 would just smash my phone, making it completely unusable. The page load would just be completely unpredictable. You start reading something and then it would fly down 2 pages and then up half a page because some asset container would load but then change its ideas of how much space it would need. Then you'd touch to scroll to continue reading and it would register as a tap and open up the ad. Then the js hell would make the phone unusable, it felt like the people that wrote late 90s windows malware went into the business of making local news websites. it was complete and utter trash.
- ninkendo 7y ago
privateSFacct 7y ago
I love these posts - this has been talked to death. The last thread had some good illustrations comparing media sites non-AMP pages (the bloat from ads / javascript / etc was INCREDIBLE) to AMP pages. Google puts a little icon next to amp pages at least some of the time. These pages usually load VERY quickly in my experience - somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these AMP pages. I wouldn't be surprised if users start naturally gravitating to these pages for the better experience. I know I have sometimes just because I know the page is not going to trap me on their site if they are AMP. I can usually get back to search results with AMP, where other sites do a weird thing where they pop up a registration page in front, then even if you fight through that you have to fight through some registration redirects to get back. I wish google would push down news sites I don't have memberships too though - banging on paywalls is annoying - I pay for a few sites already -> be great to have those be the ones surfaced most often.
- buboard 7y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if users start naturally gravitating to these pages for the better experience. If this were true at all, these sites would have lost their mobile traffic. At worst, google could downrank them. This whole AMP thing is a glaringly terrible idea and such an incredible arm-twisting that should be scaring developers away from google. It's not difficult to see amp for what it is: an evil attempt to turn websites to "web snippet producers" that can only be monetized via google or die. It's web feudalism.
- RonanTheGrey 7y ago
  > somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these AMP pages. The article links to another page that dives into this: AMP isn't actually creating less bloated pages. The speed increase is because Google Search preloads the content for all AMP results so you're effectively getting a cached page when you click on it. That is incredibly monopolistic behavior because it can't be reproduced any other way.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > That is incredibly monopolistic behavior because it can't be reproduced any other way. Monopolistic would be Google making publishers integrate directly with them to enable prerendering like Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles. AMP pages can and are consumed by link aggregators other than Google, so they are very specifically not abusing their monopoly by telling publishers to use AMP.
williamDafoe 7y ago
Websites WERE building horrible, non mobile news articles in HTML when AMP started at Google in 2015. The news articles were so slow and wasted so much bandwidth that many news orgs wrote bad apps (think CNN app; BBC app) to replace shit with even worse shit. That's what you get when you skimp on frontend engineers!!! AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. The web was developing in a way that the big players like BBC and CNN would dominate with big budget winner-take-all walled gardens. AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services, which means I'm sure Ruth will be killing it very soon! This meant Google search on the mobile web was literally dying. Every year more and more content was being locked inside walled Gardens!! I was a maintainer of AMPHTML 2015 - 2018 at Google. The project is hibernating and loses a ton of money I know I worked on the budgets for flash memory for AMP. At the time Facebook and others were proposing proprietary non HTML news document formats. Google, to keep HTML alive, decided to cache amp for free, which subsidized hosting costs for ALL news websites. I hate it that now I have to switch browsers 2x to write an article comment, too! But news apps NEVER supported this AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a working search feature AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a good user experience or global search AT ALL! If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP! AMP is Google's attempt to keep HTML alive on phones ...
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech How so? > AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services It looks like the exact opposite of that to me. This is Google's attempt at remaking the web in a way the enhances Google's control and power. That's pretty pro-establishment.
  - ajpkco 7y ago
    What I think he meant is that, most of the news website became slow and bad user experiences on mobile, pushing users to download wall-gardened native mobile news apps by established News Corporations to experience something fast and kind of pleasant. This is a problem for Google and for "freedom of speech", because you're not googling for news anymore, you go straight to your established news native application, preventing you to see other competing results (like blogs or smaller news websites for instance) Pushing them to have cleaner and faster websites makes the user stay on the web. It is a clear benefit for Google, but to his point, to the user too. (At least that was the goal)
calimac 7y ago
In terms virtuous google sv teams can understand: #Resist #GoogleBias and #GooglePrivilege
qxnqd 7y ago
Instead of blaming Google for creating and pushing AMP, how about blaming publishers for forcing Google to create AMP?
- Lev1a 7y ago
  That's some cheap bait you have there. Kindly go away.
  - dang 7y ago
    Attacking another user like that will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
taf2 7y ago
Sorry isn't this just another web developer complaining that they have to use someone else's technology? I mean the first time I looked into supporting AMP I had that same visceral reaction "f this it sucks". After spending sometime with it it's not that bad and I get the value prop - AMP is content being served up directly on google.com or cloud flare or any cdn provider that is essentially the evolution of google's cache. Pretty cool if you stop to think about it. In the past to access google's cache you got a pretty fast page response but it was kind of also very broken because not all of the essentials would load correctly. Now with AMP you have some control over that cached page that is offloaded for free to google's servers. I think there are some UX issues for sure - IMO it's open source so you can always open a pull request/issue and try to make it better... or ignore it and continue to build something great... if you have something great people will find it whether you use AMP or not.
- phpnode 7y ago
  It doesn't matter how good or bad the technology is, or whether it's convenient or profitable to use it. AMP is a brazen attempt by Google to use their monopoly to take control of the web. The current version of AMP is not their intended final destination.
  - taf2 7y ago
    so I remember being upset that I could not run my javascript code in amp too... is that maybe what has you feeling it’s google trying to take control of the web... the thing is google make money selling ads not controlling your web content so I just don’t see how your assertion makes sense?
    - halfjoking 7y ago
      Just think how Youtube evolved from a seemingly open platform - to now where tons of people are being 'deplatformed' for not towing Google's line. That's what happens when Google gets 90%+ market share. Remember when the Chrome team decided that certain sites won't be allowed to Autoplay videos? Yet other partner sites (and Youtube) were allowed to Autoplay. What if every single f-ing goddamn feature on your website was restricted based what Google says? If you're not "AMP-compliant" enough, following the arbitrary rules Google sets then they might restrict certain features like video viewing on your AMP site. That's the future people are buying into by implementing AMP. Free speech and the open web will die if AMP gets dominant market share.
KirinDave 7y ago
I had been told (and I have 0 special knowledge here, this is just what a consultant in this space explained to me a few years ago) that AMP boosted your placement specifically because latency was a scored and important factor. As such, all you needed to do to get similar rankings was use any sort of CDN hosting for your page and you would get similar results to using AMP. Also, it sorta seems to me like the author is complaining, "I can't just do a minimum effort AMP page for the search juice, I actually have to make a functional AMP offering or not use AMP at all." Strictly as a consumer, I feel like maybe Google is doing me a favor while telling off a publisher.
- pembrook 7y ago
  Not true. Google favors AMP content in “articles for you” on chrome mobile, as well as featured story carousels on search and inside Google discover. All of these areas can be a massive firehose of traffic. If you make a living from a content site, you have to play ball and create AMP versions of all your pages. OR, you can choose to lose to your competitors. Let’s stop pretending like that’s really a choice, or that any sizable share of users will ever switch to DuckDuckGo. This is where we need government to step in and regulate Google’s de facto monopoly on search.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Has someone demonstrated that if you make a static page with similar characteristics to AMP on a different CDN, that this doesn't get similar placement? I'd be more inclined to side with publishers here if AMP was the only way to get this. But as an awful lot of content sites are run by folks very mad that they can't run their own invasive tracking and analytics, my sympathy is limited.
    - pembrook 7y ago
      Just click on any link inside of chrome's "articles for you" on your phone and look at the url. I haven't seen a single non-AMP article there, and I've been checking for a year.
- 7y ago
lern_too_spel 7y ago
This is stupid. If you build an Apple News article with different content from the actual article, Apple users will complain, just as if you build an AMP article that is worse than the normal page, search engine and link aggregator users (not just Google's) will complain. That's why people hate Reddit AMP results. If you ignore these warnings, Google will probably demote your AMP pages, and rightly so because users will hate those results. The author is basically broadcasting that he is clueless and actively harming his clients' businesses.
cj 7y ago
I wonder how different Google would be if they were able to diversify their revenue to not rely so much on ads. AMP = faster page loads = more pageviews = more ads served AMP shouldn't need to be enforced to achieve a faster internet. It's not just Google that knows more pageviews = more ads = more revenue. Publishers know this too, and therefore publishers themselves have the same incentive to reduce page load time as does Google. It's disorienting to see Google frame AMP as something that's for the good of the user. If it is, it's only a side effect of also being good for Google's business model.
bvanderveen 7y ago
Yes, AMP is horrible for the end user, the UX is a nightmare, etc. But the same thing can also be said about the web in general. On a purely technical basis, this is my favorite news site: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Loads lightning fast, never any ads or comments!
calvinmorrison 7y ago
s/amp//
adrianmonk 7y ago
This article focuses on what it's like for web developers and for the web ecosystem, which are both important issues. But AMP is also really annoying for end users. As an end user, AMP gets in my way and complicates my experience. There's extra work to figure out what's going on. This page is from whatever site but "delivered by Google". As an end user, my reaction is basically: what the hell does that mean, why is it here wasting my time and cluttering up my screen, and when can Google cut it out? Then sometimes I go to share a link with a friend over Slack or whatever, I hit the share button, and the URL comes out all fucked up. I know they're going to look at the URL to figure out what it's about (because in the real world, people do look at URLs), so I feel compelled to fix it, so I have to back up out of there, then dig around in the UI to figure out how to get a real URL. Maybe "open in chrome" will do it, or maybe I need to flip through the page itself to find where it gives a link to itself. I can never remember what works, and I don't want to have to. I know AMP pages are supposed to load faster, and they probably do a little, but I would gladly trade that for simplicity. Also, I would turn it off if they would give me the option, which wouldn't be hard but they don't, which tells me they don't want people turning it off.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Yeah but on the plus side, it loads in a second, isn't sluggish to use, and isn't full of annoying fixed elements. Most non-AMP news websites which take many seconds to load and are really slow and annoying when loaded. I get all the arguments against AMP, but "annoying for users" surely isn't one of them.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > isn't full of annoying fixed elements But it is: there's the AMP chrome around the website.
  - chungus_khan 7y ago
    Most websites I've personally encountered that use AMP don't actually deliver a usable amount of content/features on the AMP version of the page, and so it usually ends up in an awful user experience where I then have to get the real version of the page before I can do anything.
dilap 7y ago
Huge motivator for me to switch to DDG.
Angostura 7y ago
I’ve switched to Duck Duck Gonon my iPhone specifically to avoid AMP links. And you know what? It’s not half bad.
dikaio 7y ago
People still read the news (propaganda machine)?
dyeje 7y ago
I sure do love clicking on a search result, clicking the tiny info icon in the top left, and then clicking the real link I wanted.
misterdoubt 7y ago
Google AMP is merely the next iteration of Google Sites.
jamesbiv 7y ago
Though I agree with the sentiment of the article, I believe AMP can easily be thwarted by efficient website structuring and use of libraries with mobile efficiency in mind. What is good about the AMP indexing process is that, I think, Google still favors the non-AMP version of the site if the AMP site is less efficient than the standard version. Some time back I built a library called DSOlib (https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object-library https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object-library) which deals with this problem particularly. The aim of DSO was to ping the server using Resource Timing (https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource-timing https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource-timing) in-order to determine if the link speed is under a certain threshold. Should the threshold not be met, then a reduced, non-interactive version of the site loads using the same HTML, as non critical HTML can be moved into templates if needed, and the "Critical Rendering Path" is used to form a decision on how the site should download the sites' elements using DSO. Since images, CSS and JavasSript make up the bulk of the download footprint. DSO aims at optimising the footprint via the following concepts. - Offering only the CSS files relevant for breakpoints just for that device; - Scaling down images and lazy loading them at the lowest possible resolution; - Blocking out elements of HTML using "display: none" for areas that wont be loaded; and - Most importantly, only download the minimum Javascript libraries for non interactive viewing. There are other features DSO has such as background downloading for full interactive after non-interactive has loaded; prompting the user and asking if the interactive version is to be downloaded later, and a few other things. However, I haven't completed the entire project as I was side tracked with other projects but building a solution such as this that works along side WebPack would be the best senario. Further, I'm not too sure if there are other solutions out there similar to DSO since I stopped development, but surely sidestepping AMP should be a rather straightforward process.
danShumway 7y ago
This is a really old article, but as long as we're here: just a quick reminder that the AMP standard still includes platform-specific components that favor individual companies[0] over smaller creators. It's still not clear what will happen to the components when those services disappear[1], and it's still not clear whether Google has the guts to tell someone like Facebook that a new component feature isn't performant enough to be included. Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google ReCaptcha. There are a lot of reasons to hate AMP, but one big reason I hope doesn't get drowned out is that it's not just anticompetitive in the sense of handing control of traffic or hosting to Google. It's anticompetitive in the sense of reducing functionality on the web to a handful of large corporations that have every incentive to reduce diversity and place harsher performance restrictions on competitors than they place on themselves. [0]: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites [1]: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-vine/?format=websites https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-vine/?format=we...
- buboard 7y ago
  a website owner converting to amp is no longer an owner, it's a gig worker for google.
- mcv 7y ago
  > "Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google ReCaptcha." That is terrible. ReCaptcha is the worst. Also, ReCaptcha seems to discriminate against Firefox, and if AMP discriminates against other captchas, this might actually count as monopolistic abuse by EU rules.
s17n 7y ago
I stopped caring what designers (and the community that really hates amp is designers, in addition to the "everything Google food is evil" crowd) think when scroll hijacking became popular. Sorry but the web would be better off without you guys.
appleflaxen 7y ago
I don't think the rewritten title is faithful to the link. I understand why the original title of "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" was rewritten, as it is unnecessarily inflammatory and clickbaity, but "Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages" really isn't the point of the article, at all. It is necessary background for the article, but the point of the article as I read it is that there are specific implications of the AMP effort that are nefarious, insidious, and dangerous to the open web. A rough outline would be * Background: Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages * Contention 1: Adopting AMP is technically difficult * Contention 2: Adopting AMP will harm non-google web properties in the future * Call to action: there are several things you can do in order to "...fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google’s monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google’s tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website." I don't think any reader would think the Background statement provides the best summary of the posts thesis; it's clearly the call to action. By changing it to the background statement, it changes the "meaning" of the article completely. So "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" is much better than the revised title, and if it's unacceptable, then "Fight back against Google AMP" is both faithful and uses the author's own terminology. I think in this instance that the editorial control exerted over the post title could have been better considered (notwithstanding the same change made in the prior submission; the same mistakes were made then, as well)
- dang 7y ago
  The main thing we're trying for in title changes is to use representative language from the article itself. Since it does use the phrase "fight back", we can go with your suggestion.
Joe-Z 7y ago
Nice one HN, by changing the title (to something that is not the title of the actual submission!) you just inverted the meaning of the first sentence of the top comment at the time of writing [0] If you are going with the second headline why not include the "Tell them no."-part too? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750
- dang 7y ago
  Because HN has an 80 char limit on titles. Edit: we've since changed the title from "Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages (2018)". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    There I was, ready to be furious and dang strikes yet again with nothing but reason. Thank you for your service!
jan6 7y ago
I'm sad caching http proxies are all abandoned nowdays... I bet those would also help noticeably, there's enough stuff browsers don't know to cache... also in proxy vein, adblockers cannot be blocked, only in-browser convenient ones can...and ublock origin dev edition got lately hit on the chrome app store again ("lately" as in this year), I think...for no reason... as other people said, the AMP is good so devs have a justified practical reason to push back against the lazy clients who'd happily have 20mb pages over their fiber connection...but it's bad in every OTHER way... google monopoly really should be broken...they got like, 90% of BOTH search engine, and browser market...and a lot of people don't even know alternatives EXIST... why do people got such stupid nowdays...
corodra 7y ago
I switched to duckduckgo entirely in the beginning of November. Just to see if I'll like it. I kind of forgot I did. I really dont notice a loss of anything other than not having to ignore really bullshitty sponsored posts and the Fisher Price feel of google telling me what I want because of "trends". That I feel like maybe tech companies need something like the alcohol industry in the US. A person cant have ownership in a brewery, distributor and alcohol retailer. They can only have ownership in one. Maybe tech needs to be broken up that way? I'm not sure exactly when it comes to fine lines. But I know a search engine controlling ads, news, tracking data, phones, and just data in general... well it's not good.
ggggtez 7y ago
I thought we were done with seeing old articles complaining about AMP. I feel like I should set up an account that just reposts anti-AMP articles once a day, and see how many points it gets. Clearly HN demands more opportunities to rail against it.
markosaric 7y ago
How to Fight back against Google AMP: 1. Don't use Google search. Other search engines such as Qwant and DuckDuckGo don't rank AMP sites 2. Don't use Chrome browser. Firefox has built-in adblocker and a Reader Mode so any site can be fast and clutter-free without AMP As a site owner/developer: 1. Don't use AMP on your own site 2. Make your site lightweight on its own: lazy load images/videos, restrict unnecessary elements, restricts third-party connections and scripts
usr1106 7y ago
275 comments and nobody mentions that AMP is no longer a Google technology, but a Linux Foundation project? Is that good or bad news that nobody seems to notice? Well, Google is probably one of the bigger sources of income for the LF, and the LF does not say no to money. Technically AMP is a project in the OpenJS foundation, one of the dozens of foundations the LF is spawning of. Managed by Robin Ginn ex Microsoft. Good at driving the interests of the strongest if at anything.
Havoc 7y ago
Not sure about the technical merits of AMP, but it's sufficiently embraced by Google's tentacles that I just don't trust it. Which perhaps is commentary more about Google than AMP.
pawurb 7y ago
I've written a piece about how to remove AMP support from your website without sacrificing organic traffic and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
nabeelms 7y ago
https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... is relevant to the discussion as well.
Mandatum 7y ago
I know my opinion here is completely self-serving.. But I prefer AMP over pretty much any news article or website. As a developer, I can't trust operations nor my wider organisation to invest in making things run better. This is proven by browsing the top 20 news websites in my country. All are slow, bloated, ad-riddled trash. Turning on an ad blocker helps, I've signed up and trialed just about any semi-reputable news sites in this country (AU) and none of them do anything to curb or make the experience any better.. Just "unlocks" more popular articles or reduces the TTL for me.
thw0rted 7y ago
Am I the only one who read this piece as a screed against having web standards at all? "The web is a messy, complicated place.... The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where almost no two websites use the same code." In any other article I would expect the next paragraph to start with "That's why we're introducing Fribble, a framework for structuring your data so that blah the blah...." But, somehow, the author makes out that well-structured data and appropriate use of semantic tags is a ploy by this one evil company to secretly profit from your work. I'm sure there are well-reasoned arguments against AMP, ways it could be improved or competing ideas for how to encourage fast page loads, expose content in a machine-friendly format, etc etc, but I haven't heard any of them in this article. It boils down to "We don't want your rules, maaaaannn" and it frankly isn't worthy of HN's attention.

895 points by mancerayder 7y ago

This is an excellent essay. I strongly dislike AMP pages, and I avoid them. The essay touches on many of the reasons why. Any sites that were entirely in AMP are sites I would not be using.

pkamb 7y ago

Reddit already has a fast, mobile-first site that looks almost exactly like the AMP site. Why do they put up with AMP and all of its annoyances? On a site where half the appeal is in features such as upvoting that are incompatible with AMP! It must be only for the supposed SEO benefits?

kaycebasques 7y ago

I know that AMP is an intensely controversial topic, but I have to provide a counterpoint here because I don't think the web developer community fully appreciates the real state of the web on mobile: > How many of you think that the amount of time spent on the mobile web as a fraction of total time on device has increased in the last five years? ... it's well below 7% and in a lot of markets it's falling. We have pretty good telemetry inside of Google and what it tells us is that the web is not essential to the future of computing on mobile. The Mobile Web: MIA, Alex Russell, https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s The gist of his argument is that history suggests that when computing platforms drop below 13% of usage (or perhaps it was 10%, I don't remember the specific number), the platform is in a death spiral. In my 5 years in Web DevRel at Google, I've never heard "it makes the web easier to index" as the main motivation for AMP, I've actually never heard it as a motivation at all. Maybe it is a motivator. The argument definitely makes sense. But I've not heard indexing as a motivator, not even in passing. As a Googler involved in the web I know that I'm inherently biased and everything I say is likely to be written off, but I'm being 100% transparent with you here. There's a lot of people that care about the open web within Google and see it as the best platform for a lot of the same ideological reasons that you all probably love the web. The open web enthusiasts consider the real competition to be: the web versus whatever other platforms are dominant on the computing devices of the future (right now, that's iOS and Android on mobile devices). AMP is a strategy to incentivize websites to provide user experiences on par with whatever else is out there. Disclosures: Googler in the "Web DevRel" team. FWIW we don't report to AMP. So my understanding of AMP may not actually align with the AMP team's. Note that I'm not even saying here whether I think AMP is the right approach to tackle the web's big problem, but I do understand why some people felt AMP is necessary right now. This post is definitely my own personal opinion and doesn't even represent Web DevRel's opinion. I may in fact get in trouble for speaking out about this ;)

meditativeape 7y ago

As a user, I do find AMP pages load faster than canonical pages and provide a more consistent experience across sites. I wonder if publishers that put resources into building AMPs see increased traffic to their website? If so, that's a win-win situation.

GuB-42 7y ago

Google AMP is bad, but I think publishers got what they deserved, at least most of them. When AMP was launched, news sites were horrible. Bloated, buggy, unintuitive, with intrusive ads all over the place and barely functional on mobile. Something needed to be done. Unfortunately for the open web, the one to find a solution was Google, and it turn a real need for a better user experience into a way to control the web. And what comforts me in this idea is that many articles criticizing AMP do it for all the wrong reasons. Publishers want to add whatever bloat feature and complain that AMP don't let them do it. Guys, that's the part of AMP the world really needs. Complain about the Google bits, not about the efficiency improvement it brings. Now, if you take a look at AMP, there are actually two parts. One is a very sensible set of rules for making efficient websites, the other is a big blob of JS with plenty of Google stuff inside, as well as a few functions that help you follow said rules. You want AMP to go to hell, simple, follow the relevant rules from AMP, ditch the Google turd of a JS and keep only the good stuff. That way, your website will be even more efficient than the AMP version. Show the world that AMP is not what makes the web faster.

smabie 7y ago

We all know that HTML sucks, but what’s wrong with AMP? I like AMP, I’m forced to pay for each byte I use and 2mb web pages are killing me. The author doesn’t give any technical reason why AMP is bad. And I don’t think that it’s open source but google employees contribute more than anyone else is a good reason: if we are against open source projects that have open source contributors from predominantly one company we should think that Java, Scala, R, Kotlin, Swift, MySQL, ReasonML, Haskell, F#, and much much more are “evil”. In short, I don’t think we can conclude that “AMP can go to hell”.

mattpk 7y ago

Google is also adding AMP to emails: https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/

mfer 7y ago

There are two paths we can take to change this. Some should go down each of the paths. 1. Regulation. People organizing to stop monopolies and cartel behavior like this. 2. Competition. Both in the form of news aggregator systems and search engines. Of these things the only thing I see much action on is the search engines and that's minimal. There are opportunities for action and businesses.

weystrom 7y ago

For firefox there is this extension to protect yourself from AMP: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ Works on mobile too. The downside is that page redirection takes some time.

techslave 7y ago

starts off strong but starts to unravel to a crescendo here: > F#&! you Google, and f#&! the AMP horse you rode in on. followed by arguments about “our web”. by which of course he means advertisers’ web. “our web” would in fact look more like the AMO web. he’s right though. this is an abuse of google’s power.

nej 7y ago

After AMP was introduced, I converted to DDG (DuckDuckGo) and after taking some time getting used to it and personalizing it’s settings, I haven’t gone back to Google.

bad_user 7y ago

On my phone I switched to DuckDuckGo simply because I have no way to disable AMP in search results otherwise.

ptasci67 7y ago

Putting aside the merits of AMP or Google entirely, I find this author's outrage suspicious. It says in Google's message, "this issue will not affect your appearance on search...". There is a false equivalency proposed that Google is strong-arming publishers to switch their entire site to AMP by sending these messages. I am not saying Google is blameless or that AMP is perfect, but reading the author's argument literally, I don't understand why this action is the focus of their outrage. Just ignore it.

tzs 7y ago

I have a page that I put on the web about 13 years ago, that somehow became the top hit for "how to <X>" for a particular <X>. I have never done anything to promote the page, and do not have any ads on it. A few years ago, it lost the #1 spot, but is still on the first page. (I'm specifically not saying what <X> is, or what domain the page is on, because I do not want to do anything that might get people to go there. I want to see how long a simple page with no promotion and no ads can stay on the front page of search). I just noticed that Google says in the search results "Your page is not mobile-friendly". Would that be because I don't have an AMP version of the page? Clicking on that notice goes to a Google tool that analyzes the page for mobile friendliness...which tells me that the page IS mobile friendly, so I'm a bit confused. The page is very simple. Just some paragraphs of text, some h1 and h2 headings, a few tables, and a couple of lists. The only CSS is on the page itself via a <style> tag, and only has one rule, setting the width of th to a certain number of px.

wolfgang42 7y ago
You can definitely have pages that Google considers "mobile-friendly" without using AMP. Do you have a viewport meta tag on the page? If you have any CSS at all some mobile browsers will default to a desktop view that requires zooming to read, and that's probably what Google is detecting. Regarding the analyzer tool, I suspect this is a case of Google's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. As I recall, Google is in the process of switching from a static analyzer to a Chrome Lighthouse-based analyzer (or something to that effect) and I'd guess that the mobile-friendly rules are slightly different between the two.

summerlight 7y ago

Personally, I'm okay without AMP if 99.9 percentile latency on the overall mobile web ecosystem was within 2~3 secs. Unfortunately, it's more of 20~30 secs on non-AMP sites, which made me to take an ambivalent stance upon AMP. My ISP is obviously not doing a great job, but it's also a publisher side problem which is nearly un-fixable anytime soon.

baxtr 7y ago

Hell yeah!

scblock 7y ago

I strongly agree. Web developers and app designers should work to build fast, performant web sites that use bandwidth carefully because that's good for end users. But the entire AMP approach to doing this is questionable, and as we have seen over the years it appears to act more like a way to give Google more undeserved and unnecessary control over what should be an open web. More broadly, I consider this yet another reason to avoid using Google properties where possible. They have shown themselves to be bullies and bad actors who want to control the internet and oppose an open web. I recommend simply not building AMP pages at all, but instead working to build high quality, performant websites which gracefully handle device size changes and lack of javascript.

wrycoder 7y ago
Yes, it’s one thing to promote a cleaner and faster web though better design and implementation. It’s another thing for Google to use its effectively monopoly power to enforce that. As the FA says, Google didn’t invent the web or create its content - what gives them the moral right to take it over? I think the collective web will eventually fix the problems without Google. The root of the AMP issue is placement in Google’s search engine. Personally, I use DDG, and would be willing to pay a sizable subscription fee to keep it from being more like Google or from being acquired. But, most people probably would not - they are used to the web being “free”. This is just another “embrace, extend, extinguish” effort, like the ones we have seen in the past. These attacks are transparently self-serving and should be “routed around”. It will require commitment to do so!
- deogeo 7y ago
  > Yes, it’s one thing to promote a cleaner and faster web though better design and implementation. It’s another thing for Google to use its effectively monopoly power to enforce that. AMP is more than just cleaner and faster - it gives Google control. They could discriminate on cleaner and faster without it, but they purposefully don't mention that, since it would undercut the push for AMP.
alexfromapex 7y ago
Agreed, it is yet another Google data collection method created under the guise of a beneficial offering

chrshawkes 7y ago

The only thing worse than AMP? Paywalled AMP sites.

mrep 7y ago

Discussed last year with 340 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720

dang 7y ago
That was Sept 2018.
- mrep 7y ago
  Oops, didn't look at the year. Updated
dang 7y ago
A related thread from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20754896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20754896
buboard 7y ago
another attempt to murder it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599752

chiefalchemist 7y ago

re: "Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles." Actually, that's not quite right. Publishers have forced Google to forced publishers to use AMP. That is, publishers can't control themselves and are adding more and more and more bloat to their pages. I am by no means a Google and/or AMP fan, but the truth is most sites have no respect for the receiving device and/or connection speed.

oarsinsync 7y ago
Neither does Google. They prioritise AMP pages over regular pages, regardless of what the regular page looks like. EDIT: @afiori comments below that this may no longer be the case.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  What does that have to do with respect for receiving device or connection speed?
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    If the respect was for the receiving device or connection speed, the metric used to determine priority of results would be size of payload / speed of delivery, rather than if the technology / hosting was google-owned.
    - afiori 7y ago
      As far as I recall they fixed that, now the problem is that they the measure for speed they use does some weird tricks around partial loads; as long as you display _something_ soon they are happy and the fact that a page might be useless for many seconds is weighted less
      - shadowgovt 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago

That makes sense. Since AMP is intended to be a more optimized site structure than the average website, pages adhering to the AMP standard should increase the performance of the web on average, whether or not the site actually gets indexed into Google's localized caches. We have HNers complaining about bloated JavaScript pages all the time. Maybe Google has actually found a way to tip the market away from those page designs?

shkkmo 7y ago
It would be easy to penalize pages for load time, Google's goal is something different.
ehnto 7y ago
If it were just an optional web standard, that might be okay. But it's a system that removes control from webmasters and hands it over to Google, and Google are using their incumbent advantage to coerce you into the AMP system. I can build a site just as fast as AMP without sacrificing the UX of the web itself in the process, and I intend to do so. But there are many businesses jumping on the AMP bandwagon because they think there will be an SEO benefit. As a user, I hate clicking on AMP links by mistake. It's not even clear where you are, is it a website, is it still Google, how do I get to the website from here? Who even served me the content? It says it's from this website, but it wasn't?
- afiori 7y ago
  I think this is a confused issue as AMP the format is harmless, while AMP the google publishing platform is worrying.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    Yes, the standard is harmless, the way AMP handling is implemented in Google products is the worrying part.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  It is an optional web standard. There are other search engines than Google. I can't help but wonder why none of them have thought to start indexing AMP pages (or pages with some other standard or even no standard) in local cache and serve them faster to their users; seems like a space they could choose to compete on.

bil7 7y ago

In the last few years my opinion of Google has gotten worse and worse. I dread to think of what it will look like in 5 or 10 years time.

brink 7y ago
There's hope. Microsoft somewhat turned it around after a change in directors.
- tyingq 7y ago
  The recent changes in Alphabet leadership seem to push it further into AMP like ideas.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  They were pretty much forced to change though
  - indubitably 7y ago
    How so?
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      Because their traditional extend, embrace, extinguish strategy no longer worked. Windows Phone and Internet Explorer failed and they were losing so much mindshare switching from one failed api to the next. The monopoly was becoming pretty fragile.

dessant 7y ago

EU citizens can submit formal complaints to the European Commission for suspected infringements of competition rules. Here is more information on how to file a complaint: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documents_en.html https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documen... If you believe Google engages in anti-competitive practices with AMP, you have the power to signal these issues, which may result in an investigation. You can also share your concerns with a simple email to comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu. > You can report your concerns by e-mail to comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu. Please indicate your name and address, identify the firms and products concerned and describe the practice you have observed. This will help the Commission to detect problems in the market and be the starting point for an investigation.

DrJaws 7y ago
I sent it a complain relating AMP to margrethe vestager over 2 years ago, when this was relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 and they did nothing, I doubt they even study the case, nothing was on the table of the parliament related to this. Google have continued to abuse and will do more if no one stops them. It's important to complain again and again until they step in.

bluetidepro 7y ago

AMP Is ruining mobile web. I cannot stand it. If it was actually made to be fluid, I'd see the value. But it's such a terrible UX, and so janky with the way it "pops in", and messes up "browser back" abilities. Out of all the shitty things Google has ever done, AMP is #1 to me on that list. Orrrrrr just give me a damn option to turn it off, if I want. I will never understand why companies force people into these types of major UX decisions on their behalf. Stop assuming every user is stupid. Sure, make it the default, I don't care about that for the everyday user, but for something as fundamental as the browser, I should have an option to turn off every single Google opinion they bake in.

john-radio 7y ago
What is an example of a web site I might have used that breaks the Back button because it uses AMP?
mcjiggerlog 7y ago
If you use DuckDuckGo you don't have to deal with AMP at all. Giving it a go on mobile is a good way to see how well it works for you too as searches tend to be less mission-critical compared to desktop-based searches.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Any good alternative to Google News?
  - jeanofthedead 7y ago
    RSS.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      This is what I did. When the Google News redesign happened, it made Google News substantially less useful to me. Enough so that came up with a replacement. It's not for everyone, as it requires running your own webserver, but I use Tiny Tiny RSS to aggregate the feeds of the various sources I'm interested in, then can read the aggregated feeds (I have multiple, a different feed for each general subject) through the web interface and/or by using an RSS reader. I use an RSS reader (gReader) on my mobile devices to do this.

Kique 7y ago

I love AMP sites that do it the right way, like Politico. Keeps the real domain, loads fast, clean interface. I wish more sites were like this. I think the first version of AMP where the URL was always "google.com/amp/politico/sdgffsdf" was awful but you can now keep the correct domain and I sometimes prefer it to the regular version of a lot of sites. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump-impeachment-next-phase-removal-075013 https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump-impeachme...

JohnFen 7y ago
> I think the first version of AMP where the URL was always "google.com/amp/politico/sdgffsdf" was awful But that has the advantage of making it easier to find the real page rather than the AMP page.
tyingq 7y ago
It's nicer than the original AMP setup, but still awful for publishers. For any user that navigates to your AMP page from a Google search... The publisher gives up the most important piece of screen real estate, and Google highjacks left/right swipes to navigate to your competitors. And, they hijack the back button post swipe too...back equals "back to Google"...not back to the page I swiped from. It is pretty much like early AOL. A semi walled garden. It offers some speed benefit for users, but way more benefit to Google.
- bduerst 7y ago
  What's the most important piece of screen real estate that they're giving up?
  - tyingq 7y ago
    The top. Top left is red hot on any heatmap that tracks eyeball movement. Google controls what goes there.
buboard 7y ago
is this served from politico's servers and how is it different from a stripped down version of their site?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

vxNsr 7y ago

I'm really not looking forward to the google web...

processing 7y ago
Where every "website" is an app in the Google App store. Google will serve ads automatically as freemium app (no code required - just agree) or be able to process subscription fees via Google pay and own the eco systems (Chrome, Android, Chromebook, Strada).
rjmunro 7y ago
Real people aren't moving to Firefox or Brave, they are moving (or have moved) to the Facebook mobile app. It has instant articles, (https://instantarticles.fb.com/ https://instantarticles.fb.com/) an amp-like lightweight way to load news stories, all hidden inside Facebook's system. Don't worry about searching for news, Facebook will just give you whatever it feels like. Then there's Apples iOS only "News" app. Who knows how that works. AMP is clearly a far more open competitor to the above. It is saving news publishers from themselves.
- johnward 7y ago
  The facebook articles are worse than amp. The pages get broken halfway through the article and don't load the rest of the content for me.

mopsi 7y ago

AMP made me switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ars 7y ago

I totally understand the issue raised by this article. But I have a problem: I like AMP because it is so fast! Publishers have done this to themselves by loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts that slow it down to almost unusable levels. Maybe if publishers stopped doing that, then you could start criticizing AMP. "Some of my clients will ask me what to do with those messages. I will tell them to delete them. Ignore Google’s nudging, pay no heed." And then your clients will be unhappy with the traffic results. Are you going to also tell your clients the drawbacks?

misterdoubt 7y ago
The people criticizing AMP are not necessarily the same people "loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts."
RonanTheGrey 7y ago
It's kind of a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" type of thing. Google had the option of simply highly ranking pages that are performant and lightweight on mobile. They didn't take that option, instead they went with AMP. There's intent there. I'm not going to speculate on the intent, because it isn't relevant: the point is that because there was a simpler technical solution available that they didn't take, there is clearly intent in going the harder path. It's worth asking what that means. AMP provides all the benefits that a well-built, well-architected site would, and that would have been the "non-evil" option. Use web standards and push people to respect them, imagine that...

tantalor 7y ago

Mods: [2018]

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

cryptoquick 7y ago

I don't know why people get so bent out of shape over what Google does. They'll just cancel it in two years. ;) In all seriousness, though, I've been on the "screw google" train for a while. Everything good hey do they throw away (Google Code, Google Reader, Google Plus, Google Inbox, Google Wave... pours one out for OT while I work on my CRDTs) while anything they make which originally held merit they just make more awful, year after year. I don't know if they're aware just how unsustainable a business model screwing over their users might be, but I'm guessing they're willing to find out.

mancerayder 7y ago

I posted this after googling something along the lines of 'firefox mobile turn off autoplay amp' and coming across this article which was a fun hate read. For some reason it manages to sneak past autoplay disabling? How?

rjmunro 7y ago

Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? It's literally impossible to use. Popups flying all over the place, unwanted advertising videos loading, megabytes of tracking JS loaded etc. AMP is forcing publishers to make sites people can actually use.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
Yes? The Guardian, all the time? And... it's fine?
JohnFen 7y ago
> Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? Yes, but I don't have any of those issues. A decent web browser fixes those problems.
nwallin 7y ago
Use an ad blocker. Boom, problem solved.
laurent123456 7y ago
I use duckduckgo with Firefox so I never see any AMP website and it works fine. Firefox allows you to have an ad-blocker though so it makes a difference. It's all about choice, but if you want to use a Google search engine with a Google browser then indeed you probably have to browse the web the Google way.
kristopolous 7y ago
Yes. A news site, any news site, around 2014 would just smash my phone, making it completely unusable. The page load would just be completely unpredictable. You start reading something and then it would fly down 2 pages and then up half a page because some asset container would load but then change its ideas of how much space it would need. Then you'd touch to scroll to continue reading and it would register as a tap and open up the ad. Then the js hell would make the phone unusable, it felt like the people that wrote late 90s windows malware went into the business of making local news websites. it was complete and utter trash.
ninkendo 7y ago

privateSFacct 7y ago

I love these posts - this has been talked to death. The last thread had some good illustrations comparing media sites non-AMP pages (the bloat from ads / javascript / etc was INCREDIBLE) to AMP pages. Google puts a little icon next to amp pages at least some of the time. These pages usually load VERY quickly in my experience - somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these AMP pages. I wouldn't be surprised if users start naturally gravitating to these pages for the better experience. I know I have sometimes just because I know the page is not going to trap me on their site if they are AMP. I can usually get back to search results with AMP, where other sites do a weird thing where they pop up a registration page in front, then even if you fight through that you have to fight through some registration redirects to get back. I wish google would push down news sites I don't have memberships too though - banging on paywalls is annoying - I pay for a few sites already -> be great to have those be the ones surfaced most often.

buboard 7y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if users start naturally gravitating to these pages for the better experience. If this were true at all, these sites would have lost their mobile traffic. At worst, google could downrank them. This whole AMP thing is a glaringly terrible idea and such an incredible arm-twisting that should be scaring developers away from google. It's not difficult to see amp for what it is: an evil attempt to turn websites to "web snippet producers" that can only be monetized via google or die. It's web feudalism.
RonanTheGrey 7y ago
> somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these AMP pages. The article links to another page that dives into this: AMP isn't actually creating less bloated pages. The speed increase is because Google Search preloads the content for all AMP results so you're effectively getting a cached page when you click on it. That is incredibly monopolistic behavior because it can't be reproduced any other way.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > That is incredibly monopolistic behavior because it can't be reproduced any other way. Monopolistic would be Google making publishers integrate directly with them to enable prerendering like Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles. AMP pages can and are consumed by link aggregators other than Google, so they are very specifically not abusing their monopoly by telling publishers to use AMP.

williamDafoe 7y ago

Websites WERE building horrible, non mobile news articles in HTML when AMP started at Google in 2015. The news articles were so slow and wasted so much bandwidth that many news orgs wrote bad apps (think CNN app; BBC app) to replace shit with even worse shit. That's what you get when you skimp on frontend engineers!!! AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. The web was developing in a way that the big players like BBC and CNN would dominate with big budget winner-take-all walled gardens. AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services, which means I'm sure Ruth will be killing it very soon! This meant Google search on the mobile web was literally dying. Every year more and more content was being locked inside walled Gardens!! I was a maintainer of AMPHTML 2015 - 2018 at Google. The project is hibernating and loses a ton of money I know I worked on the budgets for flash memory for AMP. At the time Facebook and others were proposing proprietary non HTML news document formats. Google, to keep HTML alive, decided to cache amp for free, which subsidized hosting costs for ALL news websites. I hate it that now I have to switch browsers 2x to write an article comment, too! But news apps NEVER supported this AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a working search feature AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a good user experience or global search AT ALL! If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP! AMP is Google's attempt to keep HTML alive on phones ...

JohnFen 7y ago
> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech How so? > AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services It looks like the exact opposite of that to me. This is Google's attempt at remaking the web in a way the enhances Google's control and power. That's pretty pro-establishment.
- ajpkco 7y ago
  What I think he meant is that, most of the news website became slow and bad user experiences on mobile, pushing users to download wall-gardened native mobile news apps by established News Corporations to experience something fast and kind of pleasant. This is a problem for Google and for "freedom of speech", because you're not googling for news anymore, you go straight to your established news native application, preventing you to see other competing results (like blogs or smaller news websites for instance) Pushing them to have cleaner and faster websites makes the user stay on the web. It is a clear benefit for Google, but to his point, to the user too. (At least that was the goal)

calimac 7y ago

In terms virtuous google sv teams can understand: #Resist #GoogleBias and #GooglePrivilege

qxnqd 7y ago

Instead of blaming Google for creating and pushing AMP, how about blaming publishers for forcing Google to create AMP?

Lev1a 7y ago
That's some cheap bait you have there. Kindly go away.
- dang 7y ago
  Attacking another user like that will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

taf2 7y ago

Sorry isn't this just another web developer complaining that they have to use someone else's technology? I mean the first time I looked into supporting AMP I had that same visceral reaction "f this it sucks". After spending sometime with it it's not that bad and I get the value prop - AMP is content being served up directly on google.com or cloud flare or any cdn provider that is essentially the evolution of google's cache. Pretty cool if you stop to think about it. In the past to access google's cache you got a pretty fast page response but it was kind of also very broken because not all of the essentials would load correctly. Now with AMP you have some control over that cached page that is offloaded for free to google's servers. I think there are some UX issues for sure - IMO it's open source so you can always open a pull request/issue and try to make it better... or ignore it and continue to build something great... if you have something great people will find it whether you use AMP or not.

phpnode 7y ago
It doesn't matter how good or bad the technology is, or whether it's convenient or profitable to use it. AMP is a brazen attempt by Google to use their monopoly to take control of the web. The current version of AMP is not their intended final destination.
- taf2 7y ago
  so I remember being upset that I could not run my javascript code in amp too... is that maybe what has you feeling it’s google trying to take control of the web... the thing is google make money selling ads not controlling your web content so I just don’t see how your assertion makes sense?
  - halfjoking 7y ago
    Just think how Youtube evolved from a seemingly open platform - to now where tons of people are being 'deplatformed' for not towing Google's line. That's what happens when Google gets 90%+ market share. Remember when the Chrome team decided that certain sites won't be allowed to Autoplay videos? Yet other partner sites (and Youtube) were allowed to Autoplay. What if every single f-ing goddamn feature on your website was restricted based what Google says? If you're not "AMP-compliant" enough, following the arbitrary rules Google sets then they might restrict certain features like video viewing on your AMP site. That's the future people are buying into by implementing AMP. Free speech and the open web will die if AMP gets dominant market share.

KirinDave 7y ago

I had been told (and I have 0 special knowledge here, this is just what a consultant in this space explained to me a few years ago) that AMP boosted your placement specifically because latency was a scored and important factor. As such, all you needed to do to get similar rankings was use any sort of CDN hosting for your page and you would get similar results to using AMP. Also, it sorta seems to me like the author is complaining, "I can't just do a minimum effort AMP page for the search juice, I actually have to make a functional AMP offering or not use AMP at all." Strictly as a consumer, I feel like maybe Google is doing me a favor while telling off a publisher.

pembrook 7y ago
Not true. Google favors AMP content in “articles for you” on chrome mobile, as well as featured story carousels on search and inside Google discover. All of these areas can be a massive firehose of traffic. If you make a living from a content site, you have to play ball and create AMP versions of all your pages. OR, you can choose to lose to your competitors. Let’s stop pretending like that’s really a choice, or that any sizable share of users will ever switch to DuckDuckGo. This is where we need government to step in and regulate Google’s de facto monopoly on search.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Has someone demonstrated that if you make a static page with similar characteristics to AMP on a different CDN, that this doesn't get similar placement? I'd be more inclined to side with publishers here if AMP was the only way to get this. But as an awful lot of content sites are run by folks very mad that they can't run their own invasive tracking and analytics, my sympathy is limited.
  - pembrook 7y ago
    Just click on any link inside of chrome's "articles for you" on your phone and look at the url. I haven't seen a single non-AMP article there, and I've been checking for a year.
7y ago

lern_too_spel 7y ago

This is stupid. If you build an Apple News article with different content from the actual article, Apple users will complain, just as if you build an AMP article that is worse than the normal page, search engine and link aggregator users (not just Google's) will complain. That's why people hate Reddit AMP results. If you ignore these warnings, Google will probably demote your AMP pages, and rightly so because users will hate those results. The author is basically broadcasting that he is clueless and actively harming his clients' businesses.

cj 7y ago

I wonder how different Google would be if they were able to diversify their revenue to not rely so much on ads. AMP = faster page loads = more pageviews = more ads served AMP shouldn't need to be enforced to achieve a faster internet. It's not just Google that knows more pageviews = more ads = more revenue. Publishers know this too, and therefore publishers themselves have the same incentive to reduce page load time as does Google. It's disorienting to see Google frame AMP as something that's for the good of the user. If it is, it's only a side effect of also being good for Google's business model.

bvanderveen 7y ago

Yes, AMP is horrible for the end user, the UX is a nightmare, etc. But the same thing can also be said about the web in general. On a purely technical basis, this is my favorite news site: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Loads lightning fast, never any ads or comments!

calvinmorrison 7y ago

s/amp//

adrianmonk 7y ago

This article focuses on what it's like for web developers and for the web ecosystem, which are both important issues. But AMP is also really annoying for end users. As an end user, AMP gets in my way and complicates my experience. There's extra work to figure out what's going on. This page is from whatever site but "delivered by Google". As an end user, my reaction is basically: what the hell does that mean, why is it here wasting my time and cluttering up my screen, and when can Google cut it out? Then sometimes I go to share a link with a friend over Slack or whatever, I hit the share button, and the URL comes out all fucked up. I know they're going to look at the URL to figure out what it's about (because in the real world, people do look at URLs), so I feel compelled to fix it, so I have to back up out of there, then dig around in the UI to figure out how to get a real URL. Maybe "open in chrome" will do it, or maybe I need to flip through the page itself to find where it gives a link to itself. I can never remember what works, and I don't want to have to. I know AMP pages are supposed to load faster, and they probably do a little, but I would gladly trade that for simplicity. Also, I would turn it off if they would give me the option, which wouldn't be hard but they don't, which tells me they don't want people turning it off.

IshKebab 7y ago
Yeah but on the plus side, it loads in a second, isn't sluggish to use, and isn't full of annoying fixed elements. Most non-AMP news websites which take many seconds to load and are really slow and annoying when loaded. I get all the arguments against AMP, but "annoying for users" surely isn't one of them.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > isn't full of annoying fixed elements But it is: there's the AMP chrome around the website.
- chungus_khan 7y ago
  Most websites I've personally encountered that use AMP don't actually deliver a usable amount of content/features on the AMP version of the page, and so it usually ends up in an awful user experience where I then have to get the real version of the page before I can do anything.

dilap 7y ago

Huge motivator for me to switch to DDG.

Angostura 7y ago

I’ve switched to Duck Duck Gonon my iPhone specifically to avoid AMP links. And you know what? It’s not half bad.

dikaio 7y ago

People still read the news (propaganda machine)?

dyeje 7y ago

I sure do love clicking on a search result, clicking the tiny info icon in the top left, and then clicking the real link I wanted.

misterdoubt 7y ago

Google AMP is merely the next iteration of Google Sites.

jamesbiv 7y ago

Though I agree with the sentiment of the article, I believe AMP can easily be thwarted by efficient website structuring and use of libraries with mobile efficiency in mind. What is good about the AMP indexing process is that, I think, Google still favors the non-AMP version of the site if the AMP site is less efficient than the standard version. Some time back I built a library called DSOlib (https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object-library https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object-library) which deals with this problem particularly. The aim of DSO was to ping the server using Resource Timing (https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource-timing https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource-timing) in-order to determine if the link speed is under a certain threshold. Should the threshold not be met, then a reduced, non-interactive version of the site loads using the same HTML, as non critical HTML can be moved into templates if needed, and the "Critical Rendering Path" is used to form a decision on how the site should download the sites' elements using DSO. Since images, CSS and JavasSript make up the bulk of the download footprint. DSO aims at optimising the footprint via the following concepts. - Offering only the CSS files relevant for breakpoints just for that device; - Scaling down images and lazy loading them at the lowest possible resolution; - Blocking out elements of HTML using "display: none" for areas that wont be loaded; and - Most importantly, only download the minimum Javascript libraries for non interactive viewing. There are other features DSO has such as background downloading for full interactive after non-interactive has loaded; prompting the user and asking if the interactive version is to be downloaded later, and a few other things. However, I haven't completed the entire project as I was side tracked with other projects but building a solution such as this that works along side WebPack would be the best senario. Further, I'm not too sure if there are other solutions out there similar to DSO since I stopped development, but surely sidestepping AMP should be a rather straightforward process.

danShumway 7y ago

This is a really old article, but as long as we're here: just a quick reminder that the AMP standard still includes platform-specific components that favor individual companies[0] over smaller creators. It's still not clear what will happen to the components when those services disappear[1], and it's still not clear whether Google has the guts to tell someone like Facebook that a new component feature isn't performant enough to be included. Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google ReCaptcha. There are a lot of reasons to hate AMP, but one big reason I hope doesn't get drowned out is that it's not just anticompetitive in the sense of handing control of traffic or hosting to Google. It's anticompetitive in the sense of reducing functionality on the web to a handful of large corporations that have every incentive to reduce diversity and place harsher performance restrictions on competitors than they place on themselves. [0]: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites [1]: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-vine/?format=websites https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-vine/?format=we...

buboard 7y ago
a website owner converting to amp is no longer an owner, it's a gig worker for google.
mcv 7y ago
> "Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google ReCaptcha." That is terrible. ReCaptcha is the worst. Also, ReCaptcha seems to discriminate against Firefox, and if AMP discriminates against other captchas, this might actually count as monopolistic abuse by EU rules.

s17n 7y ago

I stopped caring what designers (and the community that really hates amp is designers, in addition to the "everything Google food is evil" crowd) think when scroll hijacking became popular. Sorry but the web would be better off without you guys.

appleflaxen 7y ago

I don't think the rewritten title is faithful to the link. I understand why the original title of "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" was rewritten, as it is unnecessarily inflammatory and clickbaity, but "Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages" really isn't the point of the article, at all. It is necessary background for the article, but the point of the article as I read it is that there are specific implications of the AMP effort that are nefarious, insidious, and dangerous to the open web. A rough outline would be * Background: Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages * Contention 1: Adopting AMP is technically difficult * Contention 2: Adopting AMP will harm non-google web properties in the future * Call to action: there are several things you can do in order to "...fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google’s monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google’s tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website." I don't think any reader would think the Background statement provides the best summary of the posts thesis; it's clearly the call to action. By changing it to the background statement, it changes the "meaning" of the article completely. So "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" is much better than the revised title, and if it's unacceptable, then "Fight back against Google AMP" is both faithful and uses the author's own terminology. I think in this instance that the editorial control exerted over the post title could have been better considered (notwithstanding the same change made in the prior submission; the same mistakes were made then, as well)

dang 7y ago
The main thing we're trying for in title changes is to use representative language from the article itself. Since it does use the phrase "fight back", we can go with your suggestion.

Joe-Z 7y ago

Nice one HN, by changing the title (to something that is not the title of the actual submission!) you just inverted the meaning of the first sentence of the top comment at the time of writing [0] If you are going with the second headline why not include the "Tell them no."-part too? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750

dang 7y ago
Because HN has an 80 char limit on titles. Edit: we've since changed the title from "Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages (2018)". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  There I was, ready to be furious and dang strikes yet again with nothing but reason. Thank you for your service!

jan6 7y ago

I'm sad caching http proxies are all abandoned nowdays... I bet those would also help noticeably, there's enough stuff browsers don't know to cache... also in proxy vein, adblockers cannot be blocked, only in-browser convenient ones can...and ublock origin dev edition got lately hit on the chrome app store again ("lately" as in this year), I think...for no reason... as other people said, the AMP is good so devs have a justified practical reason to push back against the lazy clients who'd happily have 20mb pages over their fiber connection...but it's bad in every OTHER way... google monopoly really should be broken...they got like, 90% of BOTH search engine, and browser market...and a lot of people don't even know alternatives EXIST... why do people got such stupid nowdays...

corodra 7y ago

I switched to duckduckgo entirely in the beginning of November. Just to see if I'll like it. I kind of forgot I did. I really dont notice a loss of anything other than not having to ignore really bullshitty sponsored posts and the Fisher Price feel of google telling me what I want because of "trends". That I feel like maybe tech companies need something like the alcohol industry in the US. A person cant have ownership in a brewery, distributor and alcohol retailer. They can only have ownership in one. Maybe tech needs to be broken up that way? I'm not sure exactly when it comes to fine lines. But I know a search engine controlling ads, news, tracking data, phones, and just data in general... well it's not good.

ggggtez 7y ago

I thought we were done with seeing old articles complaining about AMP. I feel like I should set up an account that just reposts anti-AMP articles once a day, and see how many points it gets. Clearly HN demands more opportunities to rail against it.

markosaric 7y ago

How to Fight back against Google AMP: 1. Don't use Google search. Other search engines such as Qwant and DuckDuckGo don't rank AMP sites 2. Don't use Chrome browser. Firefox has built-in adblocker and a Reader Mode so any site can be fast and clutter-free without AMP As a site owner/developer: 1. Don't use AMP on your own site 2. Make your site lightweight on its own: lazy load images/videos, restrict unnecessary elements, restricts third-party connections and scripts

usr1106 7y ago

275 comments and nobody mentions that AMP is no longer a Google technology, but a Linux Foundation project? Is that good or bad news that nobody seems to notice? Well, Google is probably one of the bigger sources of income for the LF, and the LF does not say no to money. Technically AMP is a project in the OpenJS foundation, one of the dozens of foundations the LF is spawning of. Managed by Robin Ginn ex Microsoft. Good at driving the interests of the strongest if at anything.

Havoc 7y ago

Not sure about the technical merits of AMP, but it's sufficiently embraced by Google's tentacles that I just don't trust it. Which perhaps is commentary more about Google than AMP.

pawurb 7y ago

I've written a piece about how to remove AMP support from your website without sacrificing organic traffic and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance

nabeelms 7y ago

https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... is relevant to the discussion as well.

Mandatum 7y ago

I know my opinion here is completely self-serving.. But I prefer AMP over pretty much any news article or website. As a developer, I can't trust operations nor my wider organisation to invest in making things run better. This is proven by browsing the top 20 news websites in my country. All are slow, bloated, ad-riddled trash. Turning on an ad blocker helps, I've signed up and trialed just about any semi-reputable news sites in this country (AU) and none of them do anything to curb or make the experience any better.. Just "unlocks" more popular articles or reduces the TTL for me.

thw0rted 7y ago

Am I the only one who read this piece as a screed against having web standards at all? "The web is a messy, complicated place.... The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where almost no two websites use the same code." In any other article I would expect the next paragraph to start with "That's why we're introducing Fribble, a framework for structuring your data so that blah the blah...." But, somehow, the author makes out that well-structured data and appropriate use of semantic tags is a ploy by this one evil company to secretly profit from your work. I'm sure there are well-reasoned arguments against AMP, ways it could be improved or competing ideas for how to encourage fast page loads, expose content in a machine-friendly format, etc etc, but I haven't heard any of them in this article. It boils down to "We don't want your rules, maaaaannn" and it frankly isn't worthy of HN's attention.