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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 bandwi

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)
katzgrau 7y ago
> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. As long as the big guys aren't on AMP yet. But an overlooked tradeoff is that the little guys are forced to play by Google's rules in terms of how and where they display ads, even the ones that aren't sourced by Google's ad network. It creates a completely uniform policy that undeniably benefits the scale of Google. A small publisher simply cannot differentiate their ad offerings. If you view that as a good thing for the end user, that's fine, but it's certainly not in favor of the little guy. Little guys depend on differentiation in every area of their business to effectively carve out a niche against a giant like Google's ad network.
tomcooks 7y ago
> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. > AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services You're either writing satire I don't get, or work for Google. How exactly does a walled garden give you free speech? Especially when it's provided by who profit the most from you not leaving said garden? While also forcing you to bypass standard practices? Utter nonsense, unless it's a joke I'm not getting.
wil421 7y ago
I think you are dead wrong. 2015 didn’t mark some ah-ha moment when AMP came along finally we were able to use web on mobile. Most of the websites that did and still do have problems are auto-playing video news sites or sites with way too many ads than necessary. AMP is just a step above the top results boxes Google puts on the results page that are scraped from other websites. See the other front page article about Google repeatedly stealing Genius lyrics. Google shouldn’t become the new AOL.
pembrook 7y ago
AMP absolutely does not give the little guy a leg up. In fact, it’s only the massive news sites that have the developer time to support AMP, meanwhile the little guy has to play around with terrible Wordpress plugins and spend hours fiddling with it just so Google will properly crawl their site. And don’t even get me started on static site generators. AMP support is shoddy at best and a giant PITA for 99% of static site generators. Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow, yet AMP gives power to Wordpress since it’s the only way non-technical blog owners can support AMP. AMP forces small time blogs and content sites to waste time building two versions of their website to rank alongside the big boys. How does this help the little guy?
- slouch 7y ago
  > Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow That's a funny way to spell advertising.
dillonmckay 7y ago
Meh. It was the third party ad networks that caused performance issues on the news sites, as well as distributing malware. There were alot of Flash ads for awhile, as well. Definitely an issue prior to 2015.
gtirloni 7y ago
> If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP The author of this article is pretty much praising the bloatware mess that we have and wants more. I'm also puzzled. To an end user, this article just gave the best highlights about AMP.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages, I would not blame Google. They stubbornly refuse to do this, thus it is Google that is ruining mobile browsing for me. (I would have written an iOS Safari extension that bypasses AMP years ago if Apple supported such a thing…)
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Change your user-agent to mimic Firefox.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages Not just for logged in users, for all users. Really, if Google provided some way to avoid getting AMP pages (through a cookie or something), I would have no problems with it.
  - zerd 7y ago
    I tried to find the real URL behind an AMP page to bookmark, but couldn't find it. I think they've added a tiny (i) since then, but they're really trying to hide it.
mysterydip 7y ago
Wouldn't ranking results by size of page have pushed sites towards more mobile friendly lightweight pages?
- Kalium 7y ago
  Yes! You're absolutely right that page size, coupled with something like time-to-render metrics, could do that! Of course, there might be a wrinkle or two. How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions? How can you know a page's size won't vary 50% minute-to-minute in a world like ours? And how can you meaningfully measure load time in such a context? You're absolutely right. Page size and speed could absolutely be better ways to do this! It's just maybe possible that there could be some minor obstacles to doing so.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions? You downrank them immediately because that's slow.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      Great idea! Of course, there might be an issue here because the amount of things that work that way is huge. So now you have a scenario where everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages and writing angry digital polemics about how this is an unreasonable standard and abuse of power. Nobody actually wants to re-implement massive chunks of how their website works, so everyone will resent this incredibly artificial imposition. Which is to say it's a wonderfully straightforward answer, but perhaps not better than AMP in practice.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages But we're already doing that because Google downranks results that don't use AMP. We're generally OK with Google downranking sites on actual metrics (such as HTTPS) but not when they're pushing their "solution" that clearly has a number of issues with conflict of interest.
coleifer 7y ago
Nice card-stacking. Seriously, nothing is going to kill the mobile web more than Google continuing to overreach and use bait-and-switch tactics on publishers. Oh, sure, AMP is good for the "google-mobile-web experience", but bad for an open web.
buboard 7y ago
Seriously, is html performance a real issue? Mobile traffic keeps growiong and growing and growing, according to google, who now crawls most sites mobile-first! Phones have 4 cores and download 300-MB games daily. There is absolutely no need for this abomination. If it cared, google could threaten to derank slow sites for slow phones and the average website size would be slashed to half in a week! > AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. woosh, i now realize u re joking
- timw4mail 7y ago
  HTML no, Javascript yes. Javascript for front-end frameworks, and especially for tracking.
- izacus 7y ago
  Yes, it was a huge issue and many websites were unusable on anything but an expensive iPhone for a long time. Especially a few years back. While this might not be a problem with most Apple-toting frontend engineers, most people of the world can't afford to constantly pay for very expensive phones just to browse the web. And until AMP there just wasn't a way to make anyone care it seems. Even here on HN. Just to be clear: I dislike AMP. But I dislike the crap attitude towards users the web developers have shown time and time again more.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > just to browse the web. I must be crazy because i never had a catastrophic issue with an iphone 8 - with an adblocker. If ads are the problem, well guess who is serving those ads. AMP doesn't even scale anyway - it will bloat like HTML pages bloat over time, because web ppl have a bad habit of only adding things to sites, not removing. What happens then? We invent Amp-html2 to fix amp? AMP is a very-ill-thought bandaid to a culture problem that can be solved with simple nudges (have people forgotten what seismic changes happen to the web every time google rolls out a new SEO algorithm?). Amp s probably the silliest tech idea of the decade.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

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)

katzgrau 7y ago

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. As long as the big guys aren't on AMP yet. But an overlooked tradeoff is that the little guys are forced to play by Google's rules in terms of how and where they display ads, even the ones that aren't sourced by Google's ad network. It creates a completely uniform policy that undeniably benefits the scale of Google. A small publisher simply cannot differentiate their ad offerings. If you view that as a good thing for the end user, that's fine, but it's certainly not in favor of the little guy. Little guys depend on differentiation in every area of their business to effectively carve out a niche against a giant like Google's ad network.

tomcooks 7y ago

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. > AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services You're either writing satire I don't get, or work for Google. How exactly does a walled garden give you free speech? Especially when it's provided by who profit the most from you not leaving said garden? While also forcing you to bypass standard practices? Utter nonsense, unless it's a joke I'm not getting.

wil421 7y ago

I think you are dead wrong. 2015 didn’t mark some ah-ha moment when AMP came along finally we were able to use web on mobile. Most of the websites that did and still do have problems are auto-playing video news sites or sites with way too many ads than necessary. AMP is just a step above the top results boxes Google puts on the results page that are scraped from other websites. See the other front page article about Google repeatedly stealing Genius lyrics. Google shouldn’t become the new AOL.

pembrook 7y ago

AMP absolutely does not give the little guy a leg up. In fact, it’s only the massive news sites that have the developer time to support AMP, meanwhile the little guy has to play around with terrible Wordpress plugins and spend hours fiddling with it just so Google will properly crawl their site. And don’t even get me started on static site generators. AMP support is shoddy at best and a giant PITA for 99% of static site generators. Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow, yet AMP gives power to Wordpress since it’s the only way non-technical blog owners can support AMP. AMP forces small time blogs and content sites to waste time building two versions of their website to rank alongside the big boys. How does this help the little guy?

slouch 7y ago
> Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow That's a funny way to spell advertising.

dillonmckay 7y ago

Meh. It was the third party ad networks that caused performance issues on the news sites, as well as distributing malware. There were alot of Flash ads for awhile, as well. Definitely an issue prior to 2015.

gtirloni 7y ago

> If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP The author of this article is pretty much praising the bloatware mess that we have and wants more. I'm also puzzled. To an end user, this article just gave the best highlights about AMP.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages, I would not blame Google. They stubbornly refuse to do this, thus it is Google that is ruining mobile browsing for me. (I would have written an iOS Safari extension that bypasses AMP years ago if Apple supported such a thing…)

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Change your user-agent to mimic Firefox.
JohnFen 7y ago
> If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages Not just for logged in users, for all users. Really, if Google provided some way to avoid getting AMP pages (through a cookie or something), I would have no problems with it.
- zerd 7y ago
  I tried to find the real URL behind an AMP page to bookmark, but couldn't find it. I think they've added a tiny (i) since then, but they're really trying to hide it.

mysterydip 7y ago

Wouldn't ranking results by size of page have pushed sites towards more mobile friendly lightweight pages?

Kalium 7y ago
Yes! You're absolutely right that page size, coupled with something like time-to-render metrics, could do that! Of course, there might be a wrinkle or two. How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions? How can you know a page's size won't vary 50% minute-to-minute in a world like ours? And how can you meaningfully measure load time in such a context? You're absolutely right. Page size and speed could absolutely be better ways to do this! It's just maybe possible that there could be some minor obstacles to doing so.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions? You downrank them immediately because that's slow.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    Great idea! Of course, there might be an issue here because the amount of things that work that way is huge. So now you have a scenario where everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages and writing angry digital polemics about how this is an unreasonable standard and abuse of power. Nobody actually wants to re-implement massive chunks of how their website works, so everyone will resent this incredibly artificial imposition. Which is to say it's a wonderfully straightforward answer, but perhaps not better than AMP in practice.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages But we're already doing that because Google downranks results that don't use AMP. We're generally OK with Google downranking sites on actual metrics (such as HTTPS) but not when they're pushing their "solution" that clearly has a number of issues with conflict of interest.

coleifer 7y ago

Nice card-stacking. Seriously, nothing is going to kill the mobile web more than Google continuing to overreach and use bait-and-switch tactics on publishers. Oh, sure, AMP is good for the "google-mobile-web experience", but bad for an open web.

buboard 7y ago

Seriously, is html performance a real issue? Mobile traffic keeps growiong and growing and growing, according to google, who now crawls most sites mobile-first! Phones have 4 cores and download 300-MB games daily. There is absolutely no need for this abomination. If it cared, google could threaten to derank slow sites for slow phones and the average website size would be slashed to half in a week! > AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. woosh, i now realize u re joking

timw4mail 7y ago
HTML no, Javascript yes. Javascript for front-end frameworks, and especially for tracking.
izacus 7y ago
Yes, it was a huge issue and many websites were unusable on anything but an expensive iPhone for a long time. Especially a few years back. While this might not be a problem with most Apple-toting frontend engineers, most people of the world can't afford to constantly pay for very expensive phones just to browse the web. And until AMP there just wasn't a way to make anyone care it seems. Even here on HN. Just to be clear: I dislike AMP. But I dislike the crap attitude towards users the web developers have shown time and time again more.
- buboard 7y ago
  > just to browse the web. I must be crazy because i never had a catastrophic issue with an iphone 8 - with an adblocker. If ads are the problem, well guess who is serving those ads. AMP doesn't even scale anyway - it will bloat like HTML pages bloat over time, because web ppl have a bad habit of only adding things to sites, not removing. What happens then? We invent Amp-html2 to fix amp? AMP is a very-ill-thought bandaid to a culture problem that can be solved with simple nudges (have people forgotten what seismic changes happen to the web every time google rolls out a new SEO algorithm?). Amp s probably the silliest tech idea of the decade.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]