28 ms·

How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

1238 points by markosaric 7y ago

RobertRoberts 7y ago
I think there needs to be a real alternate solution from Google for longer term change. (if Google wants to stay relevant) Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? This seems like the underlying goal behind AMP and Chrome's Lighthouse (site audit tool) any way. This would make a lot of sites fast in the next couple months. But maybe Google doesn't really want that?
- chrisan 7y ago
  Page speed is already a penalty factor in ranking. Think they introduced this last year edit: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    But what does Google say about AMP affecting your ranking? If they don't explicitly state both sides, then we are left to guess. And I would say (considering how Google search looks on mobile in Chrome) that AMP is a far higher effect on rank than page speed. So what is the motivation to make your page speed faster when you can just have an AMP page and then a super fat page for everything else?
- thejohnconway 7y ago
  > Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? Well, that would be bad for the independent web, wouldn't it? I mean, you'd be penalising sites with large amounts of content, that aren't on a CDN. Large images or videos, for example, might be the entire point of the page in the first place. I don't want to be directed to to a webpage about an artist (for example) that has the crappiest, smallest and fastest loading images, I want the one with the best images.
  - whb07 7y ago
    well no, not really? Perhaps you could imagine a world where it default loads a smaller file and right underneath there is a link to a larger file? This used to be a more common thing...
    - sergiotapia 7y ago
      This is _literally_ what people do to game the paint speed of websites for Chrome Lighthouse tests. They render a <p>Loading</p> so it gets a paint score of 100, then when their behemoth js app finishes loading+parsing it removes this dom element.
      - rstupek 7y ago
        This is literally every WIX site on the web. 100% javascript rendered site.
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    Html <img> and <picture> elements already have the ability to serve larger or smaller images (srcset) based on your browser's perception of your network performance. I agree with the other comment here replying to you. In the olden days people had to explicitly link to larger content. Isn't that was AMP does anyway?
  - URSpider94 7y ago
    The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button. It’s worth spending some time optimizing your landing page so that it loads fast and renders cleanly on mobile, if you want people to see your content. That doesn’t mean it has to use JS, or AMP.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      > The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button. Why is then basically every single page created by Google is a bloated monstrosity with multi-megabyte Pangs routinely embedded in them and loading megabytes of shitty JS?
- windsurfer 7y ago
  AMP's current goals are stated to make pages load faster, but it's obvious that the goal is only a start. It's essentially the second part of Microsoft's old "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" where Google is wanting to extend the third party advertising and content that exists on the web so that they may extinguish it. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information". How can you better organize the world's information when other companies control it? Nothing better than taking control of that information directly. Now you can organize and reformat it to your own wishes. Nothing evil about that, mind you, but it does make you think about their next steps.
- donohoe 7y ago
  Yes - they do this. Slow web pages is a big signal (out of many) in SEO.
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    AMP demotivates page speed performance improvements though. (ie, AMP > page speed for ranking)
- throwaway13337 7y ago
  The reason that they do not just penalize slow loading sites in a big way is because those are the sites that they directly profit on. Most page weight seems to come from tracking and ads. Google IS the most popular tracking and ad provider on the web. If google penalized slow loading very much, they'd be hurting their own revenue and data collection. It's a conflict of interest. AMP allows these big, ad-driven, heavy-weight sites to still take all the top spots on the web. Meanwhile terrific content is buried because it's failure to implement AMP. Google's self-interested ranking of sites is shaping the web very negatively - towards more tracking and more ads.
  - ctack 7y ago
    You’re correct. When making a site you have to make a trade off between “Advert supported” and “lightweight”. Pretty damn sneaky of them!
- wmf 7y ago
  W3C is working on neutral/non-locked-in replacements for AMP like feature policies and Web Packaging but standards take years to deploy.
maxaf 7y ago
> Don't use Google search. This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion. Don't use search engines at all. The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous. The Web makes available all kinds of information, and unifying it all under a single data model is difficult, and doesn't even make sense. (Does anyone remember the semantic web?) Unifying the world's information behind a single search facade is likewise a Very Difficult Task (TM), one that's likely to fall into the trap of big business, as search has done, because the required resources are so huge. But what if it's solving the wrong problem? Information of a particular type tends to gravitate to local centers of storage, so to speak, which are specific to the type of information being stored. For example: - Encyclopedic knowledge is in Wikipedia. - You can find places by searching Foursquare, Yelp, Apple Maps, OSM, ... - Q&A about programming (and lots of other topics) is on StackExchange. - News aggregators have been beaten to death, and multiple are available. - You can search Twitter using Twitter, and Facebook using Facebook. I can go on, but the point is clear: every single Web-connected system offers a search function of its own, one that's likely specialized to the type of information stored in that system. It'll most certainly do a better job at searching that local store, and will do so more quickly and cheaply than a centralized, generic search engine. This also avoids the moral hazard of search centralization. This leaves the little guy: the random small website or blog, where the majority of true gems are found. Google locates these by sheer brute force: they literally index the entire web. They've taken a relative eternity to do so, but it's a problem that could have been solved by something better than mere force. Does anyone remember webrings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring What if "the little guys" organized in webrings and directories? This doesn't seem like a technical problem, as a webring or directory is trivial to build. Could this be a UX problem that hasn't been solved to the satisfaction of a modern Web user? Is anyone or anything taking another stab at this? In closing, I'll throw out one last vague notion: that of an openly federated search. How cool would that be? We don't need Google for that at all.
- donohoe 7y ago
  Try: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ It uses Google search, but privacy on level of DuckDuckGo.
ossworkerrights 7y ago
I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. What they care is "how to cook potato soup" showing relevant results, and having their pictures generate likes and their unneeded products delivered tomorrow.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  > Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. I'd rather work with 10000 people on something we can get excited about because it's actually cool and "pure" at least in intent, if not in implementation, than with 10 billion people on the current trajectory of chained prisoners shuffling down a damp hallway. You're boring as fuck.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Most of the end users today never made a conscious choice about this, in the same way most people didn't question Windows as "the operating system" years ago. Google is pre-configured almost everywhere, its brand name is synonymous with web search and most people never even try anything else. IOW, it's not the superior quality of the end product that decides the market share today, it's sufficient quality and no good reason to switch.
- hknd 7y ago
  And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone. End-users don't know what AMP is, and most don't know that the lightning symbol is AMP. What they know is clicking it gives them fast results, and that's what 99% of people care about.
  - latexr 7y ago
basch 7y ago
On the topic of lazy load. If you are using non native lazy load, please have some kind of fallback if javascript is disabled. It stinks to have a page load and just get blurry images, and need to enable javascript for a couple pictures to render.
gtirloni 7y ago
The only way is to make something better. Not using Chrome, not using Google Search, etc will have close to zero impact. Fix the mess so AMP isn't necessary. How? Your guess is better than mine.
justinph 7y ago
I agree with all of this, but until google provides a way to appear in the discover box without having AMP-published pages, this is a non-starter for publishers. Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster. Publishers hate that google holds them hostage with AMP in this manner, but the situation is what it is, until someone from the Justice Department starts making the lords of Mountain View antsy.
- mcv 7y ago
  I think the fact that Google gives higher ranking in their search results to sites that use Google technologies should be addressed in anti-trust investigations.
- noelsusman 7y ago
  >Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster. In theory, maybe, but I think history has clearly demonstrated that publishers will not make their pages faster if AMP didn't exist. That's why AMP has been so successful in the first place.
  - detaro 7y ago
    It would have been interesting if Google had openly added the same incentive (access to carousel at top of search results, search prioritization, special marker (lightning symbol)) to pages that follow the same guidelines AMP enforces (generally, avoid techniques that block page rendering or cause large layout changes), and published AMP as a reference implementation.
    - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
      100% agree with that and part of the issue is that they didn't. They had the option to begin aggressively de-prioritizing pages that have performance issues and are otherwise detrimental to user experience.. that would have resulted in some pretty swift changes to bad UX. Instead they created AMP and told publishers "you want to be on mobile search results, use this".
bla3 7y ago
I like AMP. It's possible to write fast websites without it, and I do do that for my sites. For for big, non-tech sites AMP has provided sufficient motivation to offer a fast version. Nothing else has managed to do this before. I'd rather have fast AMP pages of all those news sites than having to load the slow default view. Experience suggests that the options aren't "fast with AMP or fast without AMP", but "fast or slow". It's for incentive reasons, not for technical reasons, but I'm still glad the fast version exists.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
shadowgovt 7y ago
"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.
- justinph 7y ago
  It also omits the part where google starts preloading and rendering the AMP page when the user is still on the search results. Without that, AMP is often no faster than many non-amp pages.
  - wruza 7y ago
    Otoh, without AMP that would bring even a PC to its knees.
  - knlam 7y ago
    This should be higher. By googling, you are using way more data because of AMP pages, that is big minus especially if you are on mobile plan
- deminature 7y ago
  This technology has been available to anyone via Akamai, CloudFront and other edge caching networks for years. It shouldn't require Google threatening AMP to get content publishers to adopt it.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    I work in the news industry and have literally never published anything to the public without a CDN. It's basic, easy, and cheap. AMP is a scam.
brianzelip 7y ago
Here's one great takeaway: > Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web > ... > - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls > ... > So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse. It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search. Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids. STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search. These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.
- nailer 7y ago
  > Stop using chrome. FF is great, but it's also worth pointing out that Edge has all the Google adware removed and better privacy. There was a post from Eric Lawrence detailing all the Google stuff they removed a little while back, it was about 25 separate components. There's telemetry though so make your own mind if you're cool with that.
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Call me when Edge is on OS X or Linux (and ideally open-source, like Firefox). I imagine a lot of the hn userbase, myself included, doesn't rely on Windows for their day-to-day work.
    - jaredmosley 7y ago
      Edge is available at least on OS X, I'm currently running it on both of my Macs. Not sure about Linux though and I agree it'd be great if they open-sourced it.
      - exergy 7y ago
        ?! I'm genuinely curious why you chose this route.
soyyo 7y ago
I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites. So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image. Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech. I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business. From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content. It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs. AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.
fouc 7y ago
Another way to fight back against Google in general is to stop using Chrome and stop using google search. Also stop using auto-update. Promote a diversity of browsers and browser versions.
- illnewsthat 7y ago
  I don't think recommending people to stop using automatic updates is a good thing because it likely means users will not receive security updates.
- doublerabbit 7y ago
  Also stop them from buying android devices. Good lucks with that.
deltron3030 7y ago
I'd like to see a "vote with your wallet/attention" style search engine, where you can exclude certain sites from showing up based on the underlying and associated tech they use, and prefer sites that use tech you personally support, similar to ingredients lists on supermarket products. There is so much informational content out there that this kind of filtering wouldn't impact the user experience.
beerandt 7y ago
If you have Android, deAMPify is great. It seems to be abandoned, but still works for most sites. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.deampify https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.d...
emodendroket 7y ago
I don't particularly care to because I find it convenient.
edoceo 7y ago
This holiday season I'm putting DDG and FF on all the families machines. Flipped some over the summer. They hardly notice. The icon for "internet" is now orange and the search still finds all the stuff they are looking for. The big G makes money off our non-tech associates, not us, so moving them is, IMO, more important than me and tech-folk moving.
throwaway77384 7y ago
I moved away from all Google services (which I used to be keen to get involved with initially! How times have changed.) over the last few years. I don't miss any of them. There are alternatives for everything. While you're at it, do the same for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, if you can. I only have Instagram left.
ctingom 7y ago
Also, Bing is really good! I'm the only guy in the company that uses it, but seriously I love it!
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Bing also uses AMP. That might be why you love it.
  - ctingom 7y ago
    Interesting. Maybe it is, but wouldn't I be able to see that in the url?
    - bduerst 7y ago
      The AMP standard doesn't need use URL hijacking anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-real-url/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-real-url...
      - dbtx 7y ago
        That is more of the same IMO: yet more code to wipe off a symptom of a problem that we created with more code, as opposed to solving the problem.
ozten 7y ago
Another way to fight back is to promote alternatives such as DuckDuckGo. I just ordered a swanky tshirt https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/swag/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/...
gonational 7y ago
I used to use Google hundreds of times per day, literally everything I wanted to know I would type into Google. Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore. I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.
ldavison 7y ago
I have been using the "Redirect AMP to HTML" extension: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
gkolli 7y ago
Sorry for the dumb question, but: What does Google gain with AMP? How does it make money with it?
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Google makes money by people browsing the Internet. If they can make browsing easier/better/faster, they will do it. This is why they built Chrome and Android too.
- yellowarchangel 7y ago
  Google is trying to monopolize the internet, and they also sell data / ads. So inherently "spending more time in google ecosystem" leads to inherent value.
rodw 7y ago
It's tough to work-around the unilateral-disarmament problem here: if supporting AMP gives you a boost in Google SERPs it's difficult to boycott AMP if your competitors don't. This is what is so insidious about what Google is doing here and seems to me to maybe make a good case that Google abuses its monopoly power. (INB4: "It's a bad idea to make your business depend on Google traffic because that's fickle and outside of your control." Sure, that's true, but still, organic Google traffic is a pretty rich vein to completely ignore or cede to competitors.)
drivers99 7y ago
> Just visiting a site with Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection on makes a faster and less intrusive web. It’s a built-in blocker of intrusive ads and invisible scripts. What am I missing here? I installed FireFox, set Enhanced Tracking Protection changed to "strict", and went to typical sites that track you (news sites). I still see third-party hits in the Developer Tools (e.g. facebook) and it says it blocked 0 trackers so far.
donohoe 7y ago
I would like to point out that it is possible to have web pages that load faster than AMP. It has not been made easy but many publishers have figured out (in some cases publishers have web pages that load faster than their AMP ones...) Take a look: https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz I have a number of issues with AMP but I will just mention two: 1. If Google addressed how their ad system was being mis-used (and in many respects as-intended) that would have gone a long way to addressing webpage performance. Instead they pushed more work on the publisher to adopt yet another new format (add it to Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News JSON formats, Google News MediaRSS etc.) 2. AMP helped killed some early momentum to make pages faster. They sold a bandaid solution that was 'good enough' for management and undercut engineering efforts to address the root cause.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  And in the process introduced a whole new layer of cruft and the number of bugs I hear from the web teams trying to implement content with AMP is... it's constant.
macinjosh 7y ago
I don't understand how Google's AMP business strategies are dissimilar to what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Would be interested in what someone who is knowledgeable on that topic has to say.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  One could argue, that it never really got Microsoft in _that_ much trouble. They retained Internet Explorer, and really all the requirements put on them by the U.S. and EU combined didn't amount to much. Not saying it _shouldn't_ have gotten Microsoft into that much trouble, just that it did not.
  - JBiserkov 7y ago
    It has been argued that Microsoft (higher management) missed the Web and/or the smartphone because they were caught up in litigation. Imagine the position Google would be in today if both Chrome and Android were controlled by Microsoft.
meerita 7y ago
Everyone should start using Brave or Firefox and DuckDuckGo and stop using all Google things as much as possible.
christiansakai 7y ago
Serious question, what is a free alternative to Google font?
- commoner 7y ago
  You can still use Google Fonts, but download the font files and host them yourself to prevent your users/visitors from being tracked by Google: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin
  - christiansakai 7y ago
    Ahhh, I wasn’t aware that it is possible to download Google fonts. Is it copyrighted though?
    - thenewnewguy 7y ago
      Directly linked on that page: https://fonts.google.com/attribution https://fonts.google.com/attribution
jimmar 7y ago
As a user, AMP gives me a better experience than non-AMP search results. It's a tough sell to tell people like me that I should prefer the worse product (the slow, tracking infested, bloated full website).
- millstone 7y ago
  As an iPhone user I find AMP to be painfully buggy. Rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't hide properly, reader mode is routinely broken, pinch to zoom doesn't work, etc. I wish I could disable it.
rland 7y ago
Imagine if Cox or Comcast came up with AMP. Same technology, same idea. If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. See, it's about the users! Because the Comcast AMP framework is open, and has nothing to do with the business interests of Comcast. Comcast will give a bit to open source and have a few conferences per year to make sure developers know that it's not all about the company. I believe the fight against AMP will not be won by users or individual action -- it will be won with legislation. What are users going to do? Plain HTML pages are on the 10,000th page, below a hundred thousand AMP tracker loaded piles of shit. It is a de-facto content restriction. Even if I use an alternate search engine -- it's results are polluted by those of Google, because 90% of search is Google. We do not have a choice. I'm sure a Google lawyer will successfully argue that I can recieve IP addresses in the mail via U.S. post for any odd, esoteric plain text HTML pages I'd like to visit, though.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Comcast wouldn't do that because Comcast already flat out charges publishers like Netflix to not be deprioritized on their network. It would be analogous to Google charging publishers for top organic search positions.
- dwild 7y ago
  > If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. They probably do it with Netflix, some ISP do it with Steam too... there's nothing wrong with multilevel cache (except cache invalidation).
  - rland 7y ago
    mmmh, I don't think this really holds up. They do it with Netflix/Steam because they have to, because if they did not those services would choke bandwidth for everyone. With your Netflix example, there are maybe a dozen players with this type of arrangement -- it is the exception to the rule and has more to do with physical limitations of the network than political control. With AMP/non-amp websites, there are hundreds of millions of separate players, and no physical need to discriminate (my neighbor's network performance is identical whether I look at 2mb websites vs. 300kb websites) I believe there is a fundamental difference between the two -- google's play is about control, not physical limitations.
ogre_codes 7y ago
I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects. For much the same reasons Google AMP is a thing, I use Apple News for most of my news reading. The web has overcome commercial broadcast television as being the shittiest way of consuming content.
- sintaxi 7y ago
  Also worth pointing out Google can and does rank websites by any criteria they choose. So if the top ranking sites have poor usability that is on Google in the first place.
- Pigo 7y ago
  I guess because I work on mostly b2b or private apps, I'm not up on the latest for sites that are trying to drive traffic and views. SEO has always seemed like a dirty world of stepping on whatever you have to just to get clicks, and be the 500th app someone grants notification permissions to.
- tomComb 7y ago
  It's worth noting that Apple News take a 50% cut of the revenue. On the web, a publisher is free to do whatever they want so when Google can insert themselves into that, it is a fraction of the cut that Apple takes. It's the sort of thing that reminds me why I want the web platform to remain competitive with iOS, Facebook, and Android. If not AMP, something like it was sorely needed.
- IanSanders 7y ago
  I started blacklisting hostile websites and encouraging people to do the same.
- neop1x 7y ago
  Why using proprietary Apple News when there are so many news aggregators and even RSS readers? Isn't it just laziness?
StacyRoberts 7y ago
How it's this not copyright infringement? Can't we fight it on those grounds?
- yellowarchangel 7y ago
  Websites choose to use AMP because it has favourable search results.
tracker1 7y ago
Despite the tracking, I'd suggest allowing google fonts, it's not that much different than other CDN content (assuming you're only using the CSS).
exabrial 7y ago
I remember looking at the original HTML5 spec and going, there is no way lower power / low bandwidth / high latency devices will be able to handle this efficiently. Nevertheless, we moved fast and broke things, ratified the HTML5 spec and paved the cowpaths without a second thought to language or efficiency. Somewhere along the line, things came full circle. HTML was slow again, so we needed a new new way to efficiently render content, thus AMP was born.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- account42 7y ago
  In what way is HTML5 is inherently slower than previous versions? Pages tend to be slow because of the tracking and adds addded to them as well as client-side "rendering" for static content. None of that is required by HTML5.
  - exabrial 7y ago
    Essentially html5 is significantly harder to parse because the amount of branching that has to be done. If you go look at the amp specification and the reasons behind it, they designed it to be a stripped-down light version of HTML5.
foxhop 7y ago
If you run a NAS at home, you should also setup syncthing. It's replaces Google drive for your phone's camera, seemlessly.
- EamonnMR 7y ago
  I've been looking into doing this, have you got any pointers to setting this up? I'm trying to do it with a raspberry pi and a big external hard drive. Darned thing keeps shutting down on me though, and the pi won't boot with the HDD plugged in. Thanks for reminding me to pick up a powered USB hub...
RandallBrown 7y ago
I'm more likely to click AMP links in search results than non-AMP links. The reason for this is the pre-loading that Google does for them. The links load almost instantly, where some non-amp link might take up to 20 seconds to finally load enough where I can start scrolling past the ads. The Facebook instant links (or whatever they're called) have much the same effect on me. I'll usually open those if the headline even makes me a little curious.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chrismatheson 7y ago
Is the answer, just say no. ?
- justincredible 7y ago
  No, an open web requires integrity and dedication to resist the tide of AdTech.
deminature 7y ago
Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets which slow down performance, AMP seems like one of the few counterbalances and is pro-user, even if Google's endgame is self-enrichment rather than benevolence. Content publishers could easily fight back by independently improving their own performance and not forcing mobile users to suck down megabytes of trackers on shaky connections, but they seem to be choosing not to.
- millstone 7y ago
  Have you used AMP reddit?
  - deminature 7y ago
    Yes, it's substandard, but you can easily get to the main site. Also if you're googling for an answer from Reddit, I've found the answer is often in the first few posts anyway. Reddit is probably the only case I can think of where the AMP user experience is not ideal.
    - kingo55 7y ago
      Clicking through to the hamstrung Reddit on AMP and then clicking through to the actually functional site makes for an artificially high load time.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  > They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?
  - 7y ago
lucis 7y ago
Gatsby.js could be added as a solution to make sites load faster, it's awesome what it does
jimrandomh 7y ago
My experience with AMP, immediately before seeing this article: 1. On desktop, I clicked through a link on Facebook, leading to an AMP page 2. The page was clearly meant for mobile, and looked bad on desktop; the images were full-screen size, the font was too big, and the text line length went all the way to the edges of my very wide browser window. 3. I used Ctrl+Minus to adjust the zoom, which fixed the font size but not the images or the line length. 4. I looked at the top and bottom of the page for a "desktop site" link, and couldn't find one. 5. I looked at the address bar, and saw that the URL was an AMP URL. This is the first time I have noticed that I am using AMP in more than a month. 6. I closed the tab and went to HN, where this was the top article. When AMP works well, it's inconspicuous, so it's not so surprising that most of my remembered experiences with it are negative. Still, I think google needs to invest a bit more in preventing this sort of bad experience, because currently it comes across as "google breaking the web".
- gregable 7y ago
  Every valid AMP page includes a <link rel=canonical href="..."> to the canonical URL for the document. If the aggregator (facebook in this case) parsed and linked to the canonical as the publisher recommends via this annotation, you would get the version the publisher preferred. This is how browser extensions that rewrite to the non-amp version work, they extract this URL. The AMP viewer iframe share button (and share intents) all share this canonical URL, not the AMP url. Google's implementation is trying it's best to get you to that version as well when sharing links. Link Rel Canonical is an old (2012) standard: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    Hello, gregablr, who works for AMP and forgets to disclose it. No, it's not Facebook's, or the browser's, or the user's fault. It's strictly and only Google's fault. You (as in "You, Google" and "You, personally, as a member of the AMP team") broke the most basic functionality of the web and go out of your way to justify this behavior.
sm4rk0 7y ago
Marko, bravo for making that clean and readable site (and having 0 trackers, as reported by Firefox Klar)! There's one issue I noticed when clicking the links to page sections (#anchors). Those lazy-loaded images make the page scroll away from the section title I jumped to. Is it possible to fix that by having images replaced by placeholders of the same size?
- markosaric 7y ago
  Thanks for the kind words and yeah no trackers/third-party calls/cookies etc. Have tested on regular Firefox for mobile and on Firefox Preview too (you should try it if you like Klar) and it works fine on both. I'll see if I can add placeholders when all this traffic slows down. Don't dare to touch much at this time.
  - account42 7y ago
    Please remove lazy loading completely and instead leave the decision when to load content to the browser. Static content should never use any scripts.
privateSFacct 7y ago
For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model. https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-iframes/ https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-i... Even reputable web pages tend to have a metric TON of non-sandboxed javascript from third parties. If you care about your security this is a risk. If you stick with AMP - this is - by spec - prohibited. Something to think about as you browse the web gobbling down javascript and all the other third party javascript being pumped at you.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  Which conveniently ensures that the only way you can effectively monetize AMP articles is via Google's own advertising networks which don't have constraints on running javascript.
  - gregable 7y ago
    See the list of natively supported Ad networks in AMP: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-ad-networks https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a... There are about 200 in that list and any network can submit a config to be added, it's just a pull request away.
    - OrgNet 7y ago
      so AMP is like the play store but for advertisers?
      - JBiserkov 7y ago
        Yes. The readers are the product.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model. AMP is the wrong way to address this. Using a good browser is the right way.
aberforth123 7y ago
Yes, and use https://webtest.app https://webtest.app to show the world we can speed up the web by blocking ads.
pawurb 7y ago
I've written a similar post on how to remove AMP from your blog, without sacrificing SEO rating and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
narrator 7y ago
The best way to fight back is to use DuckDuckGo. After the "controversial twiddler", Google is going to have to have to do something significant to earn my trust back. I do occasionally switch back using "g! <query>" on duckduckgo when I don't get any decent results, but for the most part duckduckgo is fine.
martindale 7y ago
Having separate URLs for the same target document is antithetical to the Web. See also TBL's essay, "Cool URIs don't change": https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
IceWreck 7y ago
I figured how to avoid amp as a user years ago. Switched to DDG and its bangs are very convenient. Google, in its efforts to customize user experience often gives worse search results than it did ten years ago.
buboard 7y ago
It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil
- system2 7y ago
  How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? "Evil" is not a word I'd use. I think AMP is bad for numerous reasons, most of which are detailed in other comments. But the reason that is most relevant to your comment is that AMP makes the web experience worse for me. > Someone else will create another amp alternative Yes, I fear that this will happen.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > Yes, I fear that this will happen. nobody showed an interest in making mobile websites fast even though they ve been slow for years. The whole javascript corporate ecosystem is still openly pushing heavy javascript apps even though sites are mobile-first today. only google cared
  - buboard 7y ago
    amp is a vehicle to a) turn web content owners to gig writers for google and b) push Signed HTTP Exchanges, a dangerous protocol on the web. I can't attribute stupidity to google because they re very smart, so it must be malice
    - 7y ago
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
The most annoying thing for me, as a vision-impaired user, is that AMP pages disable zoom. I know that can be overridden in Chrome's accessibility settings, but it's a shitty practice that something like AMP shouldn't be promoting.
- rpmisms 7y ago
  I think the idea is that you'll either use a screen reader or use the system zoom tool. Not defending it, but I can see the logic they used.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    But what's wrong with using the web browser's zoom tool? Why is it somehow worse to get reflowing zoom? This idea that I'm using a phone optimised site so all text should be 8pt is just bizarre. It's not like the UA author has removed support for zoom: they're just disabling it arbitrarily.
    - Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
      It's not even about reflowing text, it's just the usual two-finger zoom gesture that gets disabled. I'm very accustomed to moving the large text as I read it, so don't even need reflow.
  - Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
    I'll use the system zoom if I need to, but it's very awkward compared to the browser zoom. You're stuck panning around the magnified screen with one set of gestures, while also having to scroll through the page using the browser's gestures. It works but it's not pleasant. The excuse I always hear about disabling zoom has to do with the multi-touch delay. I can somewhat see the sense of that for very particular applications, but definitely not for AMP, which as I understand it is meant for mostly static content (I'm only assuming though). More often than not, what I find is that if I override zoom disable and then browser zoom on a site that doesn't allow it usually, it ends up breaking the layout as you zoom. This makes me wonder if they're just disabling zoom because they can't be bothered fixing their CSS to deal with it.
rdiddly 7y ago
Great post, although I'm a little meh on lazy-loading images. I like when the whole page is finished loading the moment I think it's finished loading. But more to the point, lazy-loading can be a crutch just like AMP is, for solving problems that shouldn't exist, such as: your page is big & bloated. If you keep it small, there's no need for lazy-loading. But you have to limit the number of images, and optimize the ones that are there. And probably only one video per page. Horrors! Obviously none of this works when the page is effectively infinite in size - such as when you're trying to give the user the addictive excitement of scrolling through a continuous, visually-rich "feed".
- account42 7y ago
  Yeah, please don't add lazy loading. - It breaks viewing the site with javascript disabled. - It prevents viewing the site offline (e.g. on an airplane) without first scrolling through the whole content while online. - Unless implemented perfectly it adds delays before content you have scrolled to becomes visible. Deciding when to load stuff should be the browser's job. Don't reimplement the browser in javascript.
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    I'd love to see a lazy loading idiom implemented in pure HTML. But I'm not holding my breath.
    - squiggleblaz 7y ago
      What's wrong with <img src="image.png">? Maybe some kind of semantic purpose <img src="image.png" purpose="decoration"> vs <img src="image.png" purpose="graphical-content"> but you can imagine every website owner will think that their logo is graphical content and respectful UA authors will need to disregard the semantic attributes and try to guess based on the presence or absence of some kind of caption, for instance. UAs could easily lazy load by default on metred connections.
      - EamonnMR 7y ago
nonbirithm 7y ago
I find it sad that Google bloats the web with all its analytics and fonts, and then offers a solution to fix the bloat by providing AMP instead. And there are so many other third-party elements that are detrimental. It's sad that we have to use things like Firefox's tracking protection to remove all this bloat that people insert on webpages just because it's possible to do so today and it wasn't fifteen years ago. It feels like a Pandora's Box at times. We can complain a lot but nothing is stopping you from adding just one more JS package to your app if you want to, because it's as easy as 'npm install' and you don't see the downsides.
rpmisms 7y ago
The client I'm assigned to has resigned themselves to using AMP. Nobody likes it, it breaks so much working code, and I personally hate it. Thankfully our SEO is top-notch, so we're doing well without it, but I'm not looking forward to implementing it.
onreact 7y ago
Also make sure to sign the AMP letter: http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/

1238 points by markosaric 7y ago

I think there needs to be a real alternate solution from Google for longer term change. (if Google wants to stay relevant) Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? This seems like the underlying goal behind AMP and Chrome's Lighthouse (site audit tool) any way. This would make a lot of sites fast in the next couple months. But maybe Google doesn't really want that?

chrisan 7y ago
Page speed is already a penalty factor in ranking. Think they introduced this last year edit: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  But what does Google say about AMP affecting your ranking? If they don't explicitly state both sides, then we are left to guess. And I would say (considering how Google search looks on mobile in Chrome) that AMP is a far higher effect on rank than page speed. So what is the motivation to make your page speed faster when you can just have an AMP page and then a super fat page for everything else?
thejohnconway 7y ago
> Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? Well, that would be bad for the independent web, wouldn't it? I mean, you'd be penalising sites with large amounts of content, that aren't on a CDN. Large images or videos, for example, might be the entire point of the page in the first place. I don't want to be directed to to a webpage about an artist (for example) that has the crappiest, smallest and fastest loading images, I want the one with the best images.
- whb07 7y ago
  well no, not really? Perhaps you could imagine a world where it default loads a smaller file and right underneath there is a link to a larger file? This used to be a more common thing...
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    This is _literally_ what people do to game the paint speed of websites for Chrome Lighthouse tests. They render a <p>Loading</p> so it gets a paint score of 100, then when their behemoth js app finishes loading+parsing it removes this dom element.
    - rstupek 7y ago
      This is literally every WIX site on the web. 100% javascript rendered site.
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  Html <img> and <picture> elements already have the ability to serve larger or smaller images (srcset) based on your browser's perception of your network performance. I agree with the other comment here replying to you. In the olden days people had to explicitly link to larger content. Isn't that was AMP does anyway?
- URSpider94 7y ago
  The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button. It’s worth spending some time optimizing your landing page so that it loads fast and renders cleanly on mobile, if you want people to see your content. That doesn’t mean it has to use JS, or AMP.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    > The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button. Why is then basically every single page created by Google is a bloated monstrosity with multi-megabyte Pangs routinely embedded in them and loading megabytes of shitty JS?
windsurfer 7y ago
AMP's current goals are stated to make pages load faster, but it's obvious that the goal is only a start. It's essentially the second part of Microsoft's old "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" where Google is wanting to extend the third party advertising and content that exists on the web so that they may extinguish it. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information". How can you better organize the world's information when other companies control it? Nothing better than taking control of that information directly. Now you can organize and reformat it to your own wishes. Nothing evil about that, mind you, but it does make you think about their next steps.
donohoe 7y ago
Yes - they do this. Slow web pages is a big signal (out of many) in SEO.
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  AMP demotivates page speed performance improvements though. (ie, AMP > page speed for ranking)
throwaway13337 7y ago
The reason that they do not just penalize slow loading sites in a big way is because those are the sites that they directly profit on. Most page weight seems to come from tracking and ads. Google IS the most popular tracking and ad provider on the web. If google penalized slow loading very much, they'd be hurting their own revenue and data collection. It's a conflict of interest. AMP allows these big, ad-driven, heavy-weight sites to still take all the top spots on the web. Meanwhile terrific content is buried because it's failure to implement AMP. Google's self-interested ranking of sites is shaping the web very negatively - towards more tracking and more ads.
- ctack 7y ago
  You’re correct. When making a site you have to make a trade off between “Advert supported” and “lightweight”. Pretty damn sneaky of them!
wmf 7y ago
W3C is working on neutral/non-locked-in replacements for AMP like feature policies and Web Packaging but standards take years to deploy.

maxaf 7y ago

> Don't use Google search. This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion. Don't use search engines at all. The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous. The Web makes available all kinds of information, and unifying it all under a single data model is difficult, and doesn't even make sense. (Does anyone remember the semantic web?) Unifying the world's information behind a single search facade is likewise a Very Difficult Task (TM), one that's likely to fall into the trap of big business, as search has done, because the required resources are so huge. But what if it's solving the wrong problem? Information of a particular type tends to gravitate to local centers of storage, so to speak, which are specific to the type of information being stored. For example: - Encyclopedic knowledge is in Wikipedia. - You can find places by searching Foursquare, Yelp, Apple Maps, OSM, ... - Q&A about programming (and lots of other topics) is on StackExchange. - News aggregators have been beaten to death, and multiple are available. - You can search Twitter using Twitter, and Facebook using Facebook. I can go on, but the point is clear: every single Web-connected system offers a search function of its own, one that's likely specialized to the type of information stored in that system. It'll most certainly do a better job at searching that local store, and will do so more quickly and cheaply than a centralized, generic search engine. This also avoids the moral hazard of search centralization. This leaves the little guy: the random small website or blog, where the majority of true gems are found. Google locates these by sheer brute force: they literally index the entire web. They've taken a relative eternity to do so, but it's a problem that could have been solved by something better than mere force. Does anyone remember webrings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring What if "the little guys" organized in webrings and directories? This doesn't seem like a technical problem, as a webring or directory is trivial to build. Could this be a UX problem that hasn't been solved to the satisfaction of a modern Web user? Is anyone or anything taking another stab at this? In closing, I'll throw out one last vague notion: that of an openly federated search. How cool would that be? We don't need Google for that at all.

donohoe 7y ago
Try: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ It uses Google search, but privacy on level of DuckDuckGo.

ossworkerrights 7y ago

I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. What they care is "how to cook potato soup" showing relevant results, and having their pictures generate likes and their unneeded products delivered tomorrow.

PavlovsCat 7y ago
> Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. I'd rather work with 10000 people on something we can get excited about because it's actually cool and "pure" at least in intent, if not in implementation, than with 10 billion people on the current trajectory of chained prisoners shuffling down a damp hallway. You're boring as fuck.
lazyjones 7y ago
> it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Most of the end users today never made a conscious choice about this, in the same way most people didn't question Windows as "the operating system" years ago. Google is pre-configured almost everywhere, its brand name is synonymous with web search and most people never even try anything else. IOW, it's not the superior quality of the end product that decides the market share today, it's sufficient quality and no good reason to switch.
hknd 7y ago
And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone. End-users don't know what AMP is, and most don't know that the lightning symbol is AMP. What they know is clicking it gives them fast results, and that's what 99% of people care about.
- latexr 7y ago

basch 7y ago

On the topic of lazy load. If you are using non native lazy load, please have some kind of fallback if javascript is disabled. It stinks to have a page load and just get blurry images, and need to enable javascript for a couple pictures to render.

gtirloni 7y ago

The only way is to make something better. Not using Chrome, not using Google Search, etc will have close to zero impact. Fix the mess so AMP isn't necessary. How? Your guess is better than mine.

justinph 7y ago

I agree with all of this, but until google provides a way to appear in the discover box without having AMP-published pages, this is a non-starter for publishers. Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster. Publishers hate that google holds them hostage with AMP in this manner, but the situation is what it is, until someone from the Justice Department starts making the lords of Mountain View antsy.

mcv 7y ago
I think the fact that Google gives higher ranking in their search results to sites that use Google technologies should be addressed in anti-trust investigations.
noelsusman 7y ago
>Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster. In theory, maybe, but I think history has clearly demonstrated that publishers will not make their pages faster if AMP didn't exist. That's why AMP has been so successful in the first place.
- detaro 7y ago
  It would have been interesting if Google had openly added the same incentive (access to carousel at top of search results, search prioritization, special marker (lightning symbol)) to pages that follow the same guidelines AMP enforces (generally, avoid techniques that block page rendering or cause large layout changes), and published AMP as a reference implementation.
  - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
    100% agree with that and part of the issue is that they didn't. They had the option to begin aggressively de-prioritizing pages that have performance issues and are otherwise detrimental to user experience.. that would have resulted in some pretty swift changes to bad UX. Instead they created AMP and told publishers "you want to be on mobile search results, use this".

bla3 7y ago

I like AMP. It's possible to write fast websites without it, and I do do that for my sites. For for big, non-tech sites AMP has provided sufficient motivation to offer a fast version. Nothing else has managed to do this before. I'd rather have fast AMP pages of all those news sites than having to load the slow default view. Experience suggests that the options aren't "fast with AMP or fast without AMP", but "fast or slow". It's for incentive reasons, not for technical reasons, but I'm still glad the fast version exists.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

shadowgovt 7y ago

"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.

justinph 7y ago
It also omits the part where google starts preloading and rendering the AMP page when the user is still on the search results. Without that, AMP is often no faster than many non-amp pages.
- wruza 7y ago
  Otoh, without AMP that would bring even a PC to its knees.
- knlam 7y ago
  This should be higher. By googling, you are using way more data because of AMP pages, that is big minus especially if you are on mobile plan
deminature 7y ago
This technology has been available to anyone via Akamai, CloudFront and other edge caching networks for years. It shouldn't require Google threatening AMP to get content publishers to adopt it.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  I work in the news industry and have literally never published anything to the public without a CDN. It's basic, easy, and cheap. AMP is a scam.

brianzelip 7y ago

Here's one great takeaway: > Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web > ... > - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls > ... > So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse. It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search. Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids. STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search. These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.

nailer 7y ago
> Stop using chrome. FF is great, but it's also worth pointing out that Edge has all the Google adware removed and better privacy. There was a post from Eric Lawrence detailing all the Google stuff they removed a little while back, it was about 25 separate components. There's telemetry though so make your own mind if you're cool with that.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Call me when Edge is on OS X or Linux (and ideally open-source, like Firefox). I imagine a lot of the hn userbase, myself included, doesn't rely on Windows for their day-to-day work.
  - jaredmosley 7y ago
    Edge is available at least on OS X, I'm currently running it on both of my Macs. Not sure about Linux though and I agree it'd be great if they open-sourced it.
    - exergy 7y ago
      ?! I'm genuinely curious why you chose this route.

soyyo 7y ago

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites. So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.

mrtksn 7y ago
Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image. Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech. I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business. From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content. It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs. AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.

fouc 7y ago

Another way to fight back against Google in general is to stop using Chrome and stop using google search. Also stop using auto-update. Promote a diversity of browsers and browser versions.

illnewsthat 7y ago
I don't think recommending people to stop using automatic updates is a good thing because it likely means users will not receive security updates.
doublerabbit 7y ago
Also stop them from buying android devices. Good lucks with that.

deltron3030 7y ago

I'd like to see a "vote with your wallet/attention" style search engine, where you can exclude certain sites from showing up based on the underlying and associated tech they use, and prefer sites that use tech you personally support, similar to ingredients lists on supermarket products. There is so much informational content out there that this kind of filtering wouldn't impact the user experience.

beerandt 7y ago

If you have Android, deAMPify is great. It seems to be abandoned, but still works for most sites. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.deampify https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.d...

emodendroket 7y ago

I don't particularly care to because I find it convenient.

edoceo 7y ago

This holiday season I'm putting DDG and FF on all the families machines. Flipped some over the summer. They hardly notice. The icon for "internet" is now orange and the search still finds all the stuff they are looking for. The big G makes money off our non-tech associates, not us, so moving them is, IMO, more important than me and tech-folk moving.

throwaway77384 7y ago

I moved away from all Google services (which I used to be keen to get involved with initially! How times have changed.) over the last few years. I don't miss any of them. There are alternatives for everything. While you're at it, do the same for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, if you can. I only have Instagram left.

ctingom 7y ago

Also, Bing is really good! I'm the only guy in the company that uses it, but seriously I love it!

lern_too_spel 7y ago
Bing also uses AMP. That might be why you love it.
- ctingom 7y ago
  Interesting. Maybe it is, but wouldn't I be able to see that in the url?
  - bduerst 7y ago
    The AMP standard doesn't need use URL hijacking anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-real-url/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-real-url...
    - dbtx 7y ago
      That is more of the same IMO: yet more code to wipe off a symptom of a problem that we created with more code, as opposed to solving the problem.

ozten 7y ago

Another way to fight back is to promote alternatives such as DuckDuckGo. I just ordered a swanky tshirt https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/swag/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/...

gonational 7y ago

I used to use Google hundreds of times per day, literally everything I wanted to know I would type into Google. Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore. I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.

ldavison 7y ago

I have been using the "Redirect AMP to HTML" extension: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html

gkolli 7y ago

Sorry for the dumb question, but: What does Google gain with AMP? How does it make money with it?

RandallBrown 7y ago
Google makes money by people browsing the Internet. If they can make browsing easier/better/faster, they will do it. This is why they built Chrome and Android too.
yellowarchangel 7y ago
Google is trying to monopolize the internet, and they also sell data / ads. So inherently "spending more time in google ecosystem" leads to inherent value.

rodw 7y ago

It's tough to work-around the unilateral-disarmament problem here: if supporting AMP gives you a boost in Google SERPs it's difficult to boycott AMP if your competitors don't. This is what is so insidious about what Google is doing here and seems to me to maybe make a good case that Google abuses its monopoly power. (INB4: "It's a bad idea to make your business depend on Google traffic because that's fickle and outside of your control." Sure, that's true, but still, organic Google traffic is a pretty rich vein to completely ignore or cede to competitors.)

drivers99 7y ago

> Just visiting a site with Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection on makes a faster and less intrusive web. It’s a built-in blocker of intrusive ads and invisible scripts. What am I missing here? I installed FireFox, set Enhanced Tracking Protection changed to "strict", and went to typical sites that track you (news sites). I still see third-party hits in the Developer Tools (e.g. facebook) and it says it blocked 0 trackers so far.

donohoe 7y ago

I would like to point out that it is possible to have web pages that load faster than AMP. It has not been made easy but many publishers have figured out (in some cases publishers have web pages that load faster than their AMP ones...) Take a look: https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz I have a number of issues with AMP but I will just mention two: 1. If Google addressed how their ad system was being mis-used (and in many respects as-intended) that would have gone a long way to addressing webpage performance. Instead they pushed more work on the publisher to adopt yet another new format (add it to Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News JSON formats, Google News MediaRSS etc.) 2. AMP helped killed some early momentum to make pages faster. They sold a bandaid solution that was 'good enough' for management and undercut engineering efforts to address the root cause.

52-6F-62 7y ago
And in the process introduced a whole new layer of cruft and the number of bugs I hear from the web teams trying to implement content with AMP is... it's constant.

macinjosh 7y ago

I don't understand how Google's AMP business strategies are dissimilar to what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Would be interested in what someone who is knowledgeable on that topic has to say.

rossdavidh 7y ago
One could argue, that it never really got Microsoft in _that_ much trouble. They retained Internet Explorer, and really all the requirements put on them by the U.S. and EU combined didn't amount to much. Not saying it _shouldn't_ have gotten Microsoft into that much trouble, just that it did not.
- JBiserkov 7y ago
  It has been argued that Microsoft (higher management) missed the Web and/or the smartphone because they were caught up in litigation. Imagine the position Google would be in today if both Chrome and Android were controlled by Microsoft.

meerita 7y ago

Everyone should start using Brave or Firefox and DuckDuckGo and stop using all Google things as much as possible.

christiansakai 7y ago

Serious question, what is a free alternative to Google font?

commoner 7y ago
You can still use Google Fonts, but download the font files and host them yourself to prevent your users/visitors from being tracked by Google: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin
- christiansakai 7y ago
  Ahhh, I wasn’t aware that it is possible to download Google fonts. Is it copyrighted though?
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    Directly linked on that page: https://fonts.google.com/attribution https://fonts.google.com/attribution

jimmar 7y ago

As a user, AMP gives me a better experience than non-AMP search results. It's a tough sell to tell people like me that I should prefer the worse product (the slow, tracking infested, bloated full website).

millstone 7y ago
As an iPhone user I find AMP to be painfully buggy. Rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't hide properly, reader mode is routinely broken, pinch to zoom doesn't work, etc. I wish I could disable it.

rland 7y ago

Imagine if Cox or Comcast came up with AMP. Same technology, same idea. If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. See, it's about the users! Because the Comcast AMP framework is open, and has nothing to do with the business interests of Comcast. Comcast will give a bit to open source and have a few conferences per year to make sure developers know that it's not all about the company. I believe the fight against AMP will not be won by users or individual action -- it will be won with legislation. What are users going to do? Plain HTML pages are on the 10,000th page, below a hundred thousand AMP tracker loaded piles of shit. It is a de-facto content restriction. Even if I use an alternate search engine -- it's results are polluted by those of Google, because 90% of search is Google. We do not have a choice. I'm sure a Google lawyer will successfully argue that I can recieve IP addresses in the mail via U.S. post for any odd, esoteric plain text HTML pages I'd like to visit, though.

bduerst 7y ago
Comcast wouldn't do that because Comcast already flat out charges publishers like Netflix to not be deprioritized on their network. It would be analogous to Google charging publishers for top organic search positions.
dwild 7y ago
> If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. They probably do it with Netflix, some ISP do it with Steam too... there's nothing wrong with multilevel cache (except cache invalidation).
- rland 7y ago
  mmmh, I don't think this really holds up. They do it with Netflix/Steam because they have to, because if they did not those services would choke bandwidth for everyone. With your Netflix example, there are maybe a dozen players with this type of arrangement -- it is the exception to the rule and has more to do with physical limitations of the network than political control. With AMP/non-amp websites, there are hundreds of millions of separate players, and no physical need to discriminate (my neighbor's network performance is identical whether I look at 2mb websites vs. 300kb websites) I believe there is a fundamental difference between the two -- google's play is about control, not physical limitations.

ogre_codes 7y ago

I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects. For much the same reasons Google AMP is a thing, I use Apple News for most of my news reading. The web has overcome commercial broadcast television as being the shittiest way of consuming content.

sintaxi 7y ago
Also worth pointing out Google can and does rank websites by any criteria they choose. So if the top ranking sites have poor usability that is on Google in the first place.
Pigo 7y ago
I guess because I work on mostly b2b or private apps, I'm not up on the latest for sites that are trying to drive traffic and views. SEO has always seemed like a dirty world of stepping on whatever you have to just to get clicks, and be the 500th app someone grants notification permissions to.
tomComb 7y ago
It's worth noting that Apple News take a 50% cut of the revenue. On the web, a publisher is free to do whatever they want so when Google can insert themselves into that, it is a fraction of the cut that Apple takes. It's the sort of thing that reminds me why I want the web platform to remain competitive with iOS, Facebook, and Android. If not AMP, something like it was sorely needed.
IanSanders 7y ago
I started blacklisting hostile websites and encouraging people to do the same.
neop1x 7y ago
Why using proprietary Apple News when there are so many news aggregators and even RSS readers? Isn't it just laziness?

StacyRoberts 7y ago

How it's this not copyright infringement? Can't we fight it on those grounds?

yellowarchangel 7y ago
Websites choose to use AMP because it has favourable search results.

tracker1 7y ago

Despite the tracking, I'd suggest allowing google fonts, it's not that much different than other CDN content (assuming you're only using the CSS).

exabrial 7y ago

I remember looking at the original HTML5 spec and going, there is no way lower power / low bandwidth / high latency devices will be able to handle this efficiently. Nevertheless, we moved fast and broke things, ratified the HTML5 spec and paved the cowpaths without a second thought to language or efficiency. Somewhere along the line, things came full circle. HTML was slow again, so we needed a new new way to efficiently render content, thus AMP was born.

deleted 7y ago
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account42 7y ago
In what way is HTML5 is inherently slower than previous versions? Pages tend to be slow because of the tracking and adds addded to them as well as client-side "rendering" for static content. None of that is required by HTML5.
- exabrial 7y ago
  Essentially html5 is significantly harder to parse because the amount of branching that has to be done. If you go look at the amp specification and the reasons behind it, they designed it to be a stripped-down light version of HTML5.

foxhop 7y ago

If you run a NAS at home, you should also setup syncthing. It's replaces Google drive for your phone's camera, seemlessly.

EamonnMR 7y ago
I've been looking into doing this, have you got any pointers to setting this up? I'm trying to do it with a raspberry pi and a big external hard drive. Darned thing keeps shutting down on me though, and the pi won't boot with the HDD plugged in. Thanks for reminding me to pick up a powered USB hub...

RandallBrown 7y ago

I'm more likely to click AMP links in search results than non-AMP links. The reason for this is the pre-loading that Google does for them. The links load almost instantly, where some non-amp link might take up to 20 seconds to finally load enough where I can start scrolling past the ads. The Facebook instant links (or whatever they're called) have much the same effect on me. I'll usually open those if the headline even makes me a little curious.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chrismatheson 7y ago

Is the answer, just say no. ?

justincredible 7y ago
No, an open web requires integrity and dedication to resist the tide of AdTech.

deminature 7y ago

Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets which slow down performance, AMP seems like one of the few counterbalances and is pro-user, even if Google's endgame is self-enrichment rather than benevolence. Content publishers could easily fight back by independently improving their own performance and not forcing mobile users to suck down megabytes of trackers on shaky connections, but they seem to be choosing not to.

millstone 7y ago
Have you used AMP reddit?
- deminature 7y ago
  Yes, it's substandard, but you can easily get to the main site. Also if you're googling for an answer from Reddit, I've found the answer is often in the first few posts anyway. Reddit is probably the only case I can think of where the AMP user experience is not ideal.
  - kingo55 7y ago
    Clicking through to the hamstrung Reddit on AMP and then clicking through to the actually functional site makes for an artificially high load time.
kccqzy 7y ago
> They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?
- 7y ago

lucis 7y ago

Gatsby.js could be added as a solution to make sites load faster, it's awesome what it does

jimrandomh 7y ago

My experience with AMP, immediately before seeing this article: 1. On desktop, I clicked through a link on Facebook, leading to an AMP page 2. The page was clearly meant for mobile, and looked bad on desktop; the images were full-screen size, the font was too big, and the text line length went all the way to the edges of my very wide browser window. 3. I used Ctrl+Minus to adjust the zoom, which fixed the font size but not the images or the line length. 4. I looked at the top and bottom of the page for a "desktop site" link, and couldn't find one. 5. I looked at the address bar, and saw that the URL was an AMP URL. This is the first time I have noticed that I am using AMP in more than a month. 6. I closed the tab and went to HN, where this was the top article. When AMP works well, it's inconspicuous, so it's not so surprising that most of my remembered experiences with it are negative. Still, I think google needs to invest a bit more in preventing this sort of bad experience, because currently it comes across as "google breaking the web".

gregable 7y ago
Every valid AMP page includes a <link rel=canonical href="..."> to the canonical URL for the document. If the aggregator (facebook in this case) parsed and linked to the canonical as the publisher recommends via this annotation, you would get the version the publisher preferred. This is how browser extensions that rewrite to the non-amp version work, they extract this URL. The AMP viewer iframe share button (and share intents) all share this canonical URL, not the AMP url. Google's implementation is trying it's best to get you to that version as well when sharing links. Link Rel Canonical is an old (2012) standard: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596
- dmitriid 7y ago
  Hello, gregablr, who works for AMP and forgets to disclose it. No, it's not Facebook's, or the browser's, or the user's fault. It's strictly and only Google's fault. You (as in "You, Google" and "You, personally, as a member of the AMP team") broke the most basic functionality of the web and go out of your way to justify this behavior.

sm4rk0 7y ago

Marko, bravo for making that clean and readable site (and having 0 trackers, as reported by Firefox Klar)! There's one issue I noticed when clicking the links to page sections (#anchors). Those lazy-loaded images make the page scroll away from the section title I jumped to. Is it possible to fix that by having images replaced by placeholders of the same size?

markosaric 7y ago
Thanks for the kind words and yeah no trackers/third-party calls/cookies etc. Have tested on regular Firefox for mobile and on Firefox Preview too (you should try it if you like Klar) and it works fine on both. I'll see if I can add placeholders when all this traffic slows down. Don't dare to touch much at this time.
- account42 7y ago
  Please remove lazy loading completely and instead leave the decision when to load content to the browser. Static content should never use any scripts.

privateSFacct 7y ago

For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model. https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-iframes/ https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-i... Even reputable web pages tend to have a metric TON of non-sandboxed javascript from third parties. If you care about your security this is a risk. If you stick with AMP - this is - by spec - prohibited. Something to think about as you browse the web gobbling down javascript and all the other third party javascript being pumped at you.

ogre_codes 7y ago
Which conveniently ensures that the only way you can effectively monetize AMP articles is via Google's own advertising networks which don't have constraints on running javascript.
- gregable 7y ago
  See the list of natively supported Ad networks in AMP: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-ad-networks https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a... There are about 200 in that list and any network can submit a config to be added, it's just a pull request away.
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    so AMP is like the play store but for advertisers?
    - JBiserkov 7y ago
      Yes. The readers are the product.
JohnFen 7y ago
> For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model. AMP is the wrong way to address this. Using a good browser is the right way.

aberforth123 7y ago

Yes, and use https://webtest.app https://webtest.app to show the world we can speed up the web by blocking ads.

pawurb 7y ago

I've written a similar post on how to remove AMP from your blog, without sacrificing SEO rating and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance

narrator 7y ago

The best way to fight back is to use DuckDuckGo. After the "controversial twiddler", Google is going to have to have to do something significant to earn my trust back. I do occasionally switch back using "g! <query>" on duckduckgo when I don't get any decent results, but for the most part duckduckgo is fine.

martindale 7y ago

Having separate URLs for the same target document is antithetical to the Web. See also TBL's essay, "Cool URIs don't change": https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

IceWreck 7y ago

I figured how to avoid amp as a user years ago. Switched to DDG and its bangs are very convenient. Google, in its efforts to customize user experience often gives worse search results than it did ten years ago.

buboard 7y ago

It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil

system2 7y ago
How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? "Evil" is not a word I'd use. I think AMP is bad for numerous reasons, most of which are detailed in other comments. But the reason that is most relevant to your comment is that AMP makes the web experience worse for me. > Someone else will create another amp alternative Yes, I fear that this will happen.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > Yes, I fear that this will happen. nobody showed an interest in making mobile websites fast even though they ve been slow for years. The whole javascript corporate ecosystem is still openly pushing heavy javascript apps even though sites are mobile-first today. only google cared
- buboard 7y ago
  amp is a vehicle to a) turn web content owners to gig writers for google and b) push Signed HTTP Exchanges, a dangerous protocol on the web. I can't attribute stupidity to google because they re very smart, so it must be malice
  - 7y ago

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

The most annoying thing for me, as a vision-impaired user, is that AMP pages disable zoom. I know that can be overridden in Chrome's accessibility settings, but it's a shitty practice that something like AMP shouldn't be promoting.

rpmisms 7y ago
I think the idea is that you'll either use a screen reader or use the system zoom tool. Not defending it, but I can see the logic they used.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  But what's wrong with using the web browser's zoom tool? Why is it somehow worse to get reflowing zoom? This idea that I'm using a phone optimised site so all text should be 8pt is just bizarre. It's not like the UA author has removed support for zoom: they're just disabling it arbitrarily.
  - Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
    It's not even about reflowing text, it's just the usual two-finger zoom gesture that gets disabled. I'm very accustomed to moving the large text as I read it, so don't even need reflow.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  I'll use the system zoom if I need to, but it's very awkward compared to the browser zoom. You're stuck panning around the magnified screen with one set of gestures, while also having to scroll through the page using the browser's gestures. It works but it's not pleasant. The excuse I always hear about disabling zoom has to do with the multi-touch delay. I can somewhat see the sense of that for very particular applications, but definitely not for AMP, which as I understand it is meant for mostly static content (I'm only assuming though). More often than not, what I find is that if I override zoom disable and then browser zoom on a site that doesn't allow it usually, it ends up breaking the layout as you zoom. This makes me wonder if they're just disabling zoom because they can't be bothered fixing their CSS to deal with it.

rdiddly 7y ago

Great post, although I'm a little meh on lazy-loading images. I like when the whole page is finished loading the moment I think it's finished loading. But more to the point, lazy-loading can be a crutch just like AMP is, for solving problems that shouldn't exist, such as: your page is big & bloated. If you keep it small, there's no need for lazy-loading. But you have to limit the number of images, and optimize the ones that are there. And probably only one video per page. Horrors! Obviously none of this works when the page is effectively infinite in size - such as when you're trying to give the user the addictive excitement of scrolling through a continuous, visually-rich "feed".

account42 7y ago
Yeah, please don't add lazy loading. - It breaks viewing the site with javascript disabled. - It prevents viewing the site offline (e.g. on an airplane) without first scrolling through the whole content while online. - Unless implemented perfectly it adds delays before content you have scrolled to becomes visible. Deciding when to load stuff should be the browser's job. Don't reimplement the browser in javascript.
- EamonnMR 7y ago
  I'd love to see a lazy loading idiom implemented in pure HTML. But I'm not holding my breath.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    What's wrong with <img src="image.png">? Maybe some kind of semantic purpose <img src="image.png" purpose="decoration"> vs <img src="image.png" purpose="graphical-content"> but you can imagine every website owner will think that their logo is graphical content and respectful UA authors will need to disregard the semantic attributes and try to guess based on the presence or absence of some kind of caption, for instance. UAs could easily lazy load by default on metred connections.
    - EamonnMR 7y ago

nonbirithm 7y ago

I find it sad that Google bloats the web with all its analytics and fonts, and then offers a solution to fix the bloat by providing AMP instead. And there are so many other third-party elements that are detrimental. It's sad that we have to use things like Firefox's tracking protection to remove all this bloat that people insert on webpages just because it's possible to do so today and it wasn't fifteen years ago. It feels like a Pandora's Box at times. We can complain a lot but nothing is stopping you from adding just one more JS package to your app if you want to, because it's as easy as 'npm install' and you don't see the downsides.

rpmisms 7y ago

The client I'm assigned to has resigned themselves to using AMP. Nobody likes it, it breaks so much working code, and I personally hate it. Thankfully our SEO is top-notch, so we're doing well without it, but I'm not looking forward to implementing it.

onreact 7y ago

Also make sure to sign the AMP letter: http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/