14 ms·

AMP is an anti-competitive abortion that should just die. It's Google throwing its weight to force websites into dubious practices all in favor of an alleged p

AMP is an anti-competitive abortion that should just die. It's Google throwing its weight to force websites into dubious practices all in favor of an alleged performance. Users also get the short end by being served low quality pages instead of the full experiences they expect. I have this extension [1] to make sure I never visit an AMP page again. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

chuckSu 6y ago
Agreed
recursive 6y ago
In my experience, as a user, the performance improvement was more than "alleged".
- selsta 6y ago
  In my experience AMP website would always be missing features like comments or be bugged in other ways so I usually have to load the full website anyway. It just wastes my time and is one of the reasons why I switched away from Google search.
  - admax88q 6y ago
    99% of the time I didn't want comments, I just wanted the content. AMP performance was a huge win for me as a user. I almost never wanted the "full experience" of a page. I wanted its core content, quickly. I agree AMP is anti-competitive, but if publishers made their default pages as lightweight as an AMP page _felt_ then they would have far more of a leg to stand on with users in regards to it being anti-competitive.
    - p49k 6y ago
      Publishers can’t make their default pages feel as lightweight as AMP pages because Google won’t preload their content like they do with AMP pages.
      - three_seagrass 6y ago
        Both Bing and Google support preloading and prefetching HTML5 specs, independent of AMP.
      - admax88q 6y ago
        On a desktop 1gigabit connection: https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/ Loads almost instantly. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning-underpants-ward/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoni... Takes almost 6 seconds to finish loading and settle (content stop moving around). Pre-loading is not the only reason amp is faster. On mobile its even more dramatic.
    - dbt00 6y ago
      That's all well and good when you're browsing search results, but then people copy and paste shitty amp links all over the place when they no longer have any advantages (because they're not precached).
- sequoia 6y ago
  Isn't this at least in part because google was caching the pages & serving them (possibly pre-loading them, I don't know) from their own Google CDN? So comparing the speed of loading a performant page from google's CDN from a SERP click vs. loading the page from the origin is not really a fair comparison. My website would be faster if it were in a warm google CDN cache as well :) https://developers.google.com/amp/cache https://developers.google.com/amp/cache
  - HALtheWise 6y ago
    Yeah, but the only reason that AMP is able to preload the page from Google's (or Cloudflare's) CDN cache without leaking your information to the website is because of all the other design decisions.
    - fidelramos 6y ago
      It doesn't leak information to the website but even worse it leaks your information to Google.
  - Drew_ 6y ago
    This is another purported benefit of serving AMP pages but doesn't this imply publications weren't already using CDN's previously or that Google's CDN is much faster than competitors? I would guess neither of those are true.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      The entire design of AMP is such that amp links can be safely preloaded by the browser, making effective load times 0ms, dinner the content is already on your device when your click the link.
- wil421 6y ago
  Performance only improved for sites that have 5 or 6 ads going across your screen as you scroll and an autoplaying ad video taking up a good potion of the actual content.
  - recursive 6y ago
    In my anecdotal experience, non-AMP pages are/were strongly correlated with the type of ads you're describing.
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  There was a recent article on HN that alleged that google slowed down non-amp pages (by delaying the execution of the link-click) in order to further amp's perceived improvement.
impalallama 6y ago
It’s also straight up bad for what it does. Like whenever I end up viewing an amp article on mobile half the time rather than scrolling down the page I accidentally swipe to the next article interrupting my reading.
- 8note 6y ago
  Not to mention, only half the article is even visible, since anything paywalled doesn't have you logged in
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Also AMP pages hijack Chrome Mobile's menu bar so you can't close the tab or switch to another one without scrolling all the way to the top of the page. That's straight up malicious.
numpad0 6y ago
AMP is WAP with flips
- emayljames 6y ago
  The mobile web standard of old, not the CardyB version.
abhinavsharma 6y ago
For those of you on iOS, you can also disable AMP in Kiwi Browser (https://kiwibrowser.com/features/ https://kiwibrowser.com/features/). But if you're looking for something more generally extensible to work around AMP and other things that make the modern mobile internet frustrating, we've been working on a browser for iOS that's extensible with low code/no-code extensions as well as JS. We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8 http://share.insightbrowser.com/8 Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com
- rekabis 6y ago
  The Kiwi browser does not exist in the App Store for iOS 14.
  - abhinavsharma 6y ago
    Good excuse to try the Insight beta instead :)
GuB-42 6y ago
It actually forces websites into good practices. Maybe not the absolute best, but most of the times, the AMP site is just better, or at least, faster. People usually don't want a "full experience" when reading news. Especially when the "full experience" is pop-up ads and autoplaying video. The bad part about AMP is that it is tied to Google services. But once de-Googled, AMP is really good 99% of the times, I leave 1% for those web designers who really use their skills to provide a better user experience, and do it right.
- sam_goody 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I disagree. Considering all the extra JS it requires to preload, I also question it from a practical standpoint. Of course, if you are otherwise including 3MB of JS for no reason, and it isn't cached, and you aren't using a CDN, maybe, perhaps, Google's CDN might serve it faster.. Though to be fair, I use FF, so AMP is hostile to it, and anyways FF has this great reader mode.. But do you have any numbers to back up the claims that any AMP pages are ever better?
- stetrain 6y ago
  Yep, I actually like the idea of a narrow standard like AMP for fast loading content pages. The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results. I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    > The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results. I think this gets at a core tension - there are three parties involved in a search results page. The search engine, the destination site, and the user. Each has its own set of incentives. Both search engine and destination site have this bizarre idea that they have some kind of root-given right to the user's undivided attention for as long as they like. The user's interests are frequently poorly represented. They rarely include giving either search engine or destination site the amount of engagement each feels they deserve. Often, but not always, the search engine is somewhat better aligned with the user. > I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception. I personally have quite deep doubts. A standard like AMP works only because it can require adhering very strictly to a tightly written specification that blocks a lot of the things website authors want to do. I suspect AMP as a browser standard would produce a vast amount of forever broken webpages before publishers ditched it due to poor ad revenues and went back to their crappy, bloated, slow, ad-laden pages. The ability to load it into a CDN controlled by someone else - kind of a huge deal for performance reasons - is exactly the key feature that's user-friendly and hated by publishers. It's the kind of thing that would be cut out of a browser standard or just ignored by publishers.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
> Users also get the short end by being served low quality pages instead of the full experiences they expect. exactly this, it's WAP/WML all over again
lern_too_spel 6y ago
What is anticompetitive about AMP? Publishers publish in one format, and it is picked up by multiple link aggregators. It is the opposite of anticompetitive.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Higher search result page placement required AMP (in the news carousel).
bradgessler 6y ago
I’ll never understand why a search engine doesn’t just adjust its ranking algorithms to penalize websites that load slowly and perform poorly. For example, why not rank https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en above https://cnn.com/ https://cnn.com/?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Supposedly, Google does do that. It doesn’t work that well when everyone is bloated though.
nomel 6y ago
When AMP first came out in 2015, I had a mobile internet plan with some pretty extreme data caps with throttling down to LTE after they were exceeded. I absolutely loved AMP. I imagine I was in the target audience.

chuckSu 6y ago

Agreed

recursive 6y ago

In my experience, as a user, the performance improvement was more than "alleged".

selsta 6y ago
In my experience AMP website would always be missing features like comments or be bugged in other ways so I usually have to load the full website anyway. It just wastes my time and is one of the reasons why I switched away from Google search.
- admax88q 6y ago
  99% of the time I didn't want comments, I just wanted the content. AMP performance was a huge win for me as a user. I almost never wanted the "full experience" of a page. I wanted its core content, quickly. I agree AMP is anti-competitive, but if publishers made their default pages as lightweight as an AMP page _felt_ then they would have far more of a leg to stand on with users in regards to it being anti-competitive.
  - p49k 6y ago
    Publishers can’t make their default pages feel as lightweight as AMP pages because Google won’t preload their content like they do with AMP pages.
    - three_seagrass 6y ago
      Both Bing and Google support preloading and prefetching HTML5 specs, independent of AMP.
    - admax88q 6y ago
      On a desktop 1gigabit connection: https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/ Loads almost instantly. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning-underpants-ward/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoni... Takes almost 6 seconds to finish loading and settle (content stop moving around). Pre-loading is not the only reason amp is faster. On mobile its even more dramatic.
  - dbt00 6y ago
    That's all well and good when you're browsing search results, but then people copy and paste shitty amp links all over the place when they no longer have any advantages (because they're not precached).
sequoia 6y ago
Isn't this at least in part because google was caching the pages & serving them (possibly pre-loading them, I don't know) from their own Google CDN? So comparing the speed of loading a performant page from google's CDN from a SERP click vs. loading the page from the origin is not really a fair comparison. My website would be faster if it were in a warm google CDN cache as well :) https://developers.google.com/amp/cache https://developers.google.com/amp/cache
- HALtheWise 6y ago
  Yeah, but the only reason that AMP is able to preload the page from Google's (or Cloudflare's) CDN cache without leaking your information to the website is because of all the other design decisions.
  - fidelramos 6y ago
    It doesn't leak information to the website but even worse it leaks your information to Google.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  This is another purported benefit of serving AMP pages but doesn't this imply publications weren't already using CDN's previously or that Google's CDN is much faster than competitors? I would guess neither of those are true.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    The entire design of AMP is such that amp links can be safely preloaded by the browser, making effective load times 0ms, dinner the content is already on your device when your click the link.
wil421 6y ago
Performance only improved for sites that have 5 or 6 ads going across your screen as you scroll and an autoplaying ad video taking up a good potion of the actual content.
- recursive 6y ago
  In my anecdotal experience, non-AMP pages are/were strongly correlated with the type of ads you're describing.
vineyardmike 6y ago
There was a recent article on HN that alleged that google slowed down non-amp pages (by delaying the execution of the link-click) in order to further amp's perceived improvement.

impalallama 6y ago

It’s also straight up bad for what it does. Like whenever I end up viewing an amp article on mobile half the time rather than scrolling down the page I accidentally swipe to the next article interrupting my reading.

8note 6y ago
Not to mention, only half the article is even visible, since anything paywalled doesn't have you logged in
- Causality1 6y ago
  Also AMP pages hijack Chrome Mobile's menu bar so you can't close the tab or switch to another one without scrolling all the way to the top of the page. That's straight up malicious.

numpad0 6y ago

AMP is WAP with flips

emayljames 6y ago
The mobile web standard of old, not the CardyB version.

abhinavsharma 6y ago

For those of you on iOS, you can also disable AMP in Kiwi Browser (https://kiwibrowser.com/features/ https://kiwibrowser.com/features/). But if you're looking for something more generally extensible to work around AMP and other things that make the modern mobile internet frustrating, we've been working on a browser for iOS that's extensible with low code/no-code extensions as well as JS. We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8 http://share.insightbrowser.com/8 Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com

rekabis 6y ago
The Kiwi browser does not exist in the App Store for iOS 14.
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Good excuse to try the Insight beta instead :)

GuB-42 6y ago

It actually forces websites into good practices. Maybe not the absolute best, but most of the times, the AMP site is just better, or at least, faster. People usually don't want a "full experience" when reading news. Especially when the "full experience" is pop-up ads and autoplaying video. The bad part about AMP is that it is tied to Google services. But once de-Googled, AMP is really good 99% of the times, I leave 1% for those web designers who really use their skills to provide a better user experience, and do it right.

sam_goody 6y ago
Anecdotally, I disagree. Considering all the extra JS it requires to preload, I also question it from a practical standpoint. Of course, if you are otherwise including 3MB of JS for no reason, and it isn't cached, and you aren't using a CDN, maybe, perhaps, Google's CDN might serve it faster.. Though to be fair, I use FF, so AMP is hostile to it, and anyways FF has this great reader mode.. But do you have any numbers to back up the claims that any AMP pages are ever better?
stetrain 6y ago
Yep, I actually like the idea of a narrow standard like AMP for fast loading content pages. The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results. I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
- Kalium 6y ago
  > The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results. I think this gets at a core tension - there are three parties involved in a search results page. The search engine, the destination site, and the user. Each has its own set of incentives. Both search engine and destination site have this bizarre idea that they have some kind of root-given right to the user's undivided attention for as long as they like. The user's interests are frequently poorly represented. They rarely include giving either search engine or destination site the amount of engagement each feels they deserve. Often, but not always, the search engine is somewhat better aligned with the user. > I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception. I personally have quite deep doubts. A standard like AMP works only because it can require adhering very strictly to a tightly written specification that blocks a lot of the things website authors want to do. I suspect AMP as a browser standard would produce a vast amount of forever broken webpages before publishers ditched it due to poor ad revenues and went back to their crappy, bloated, slow, ad-laden pages. The ability to load it into a CDN controlled by someone else - kind of a huge deal for performance reasons - is exactly the key feature that's user-friendly and hated by publishers. It's the kind of thing that would be cut out of a browser standard or just ignored by publishers.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

> Users also get the short end by being served low quality pages instead of the full experiences they expect. exactly this, it's WAP/WML all over again

lern_too_spel 6y ago

What is anticompetitive about AMP? Publishers publish in one format, and it is picked up by multiple link aggregators. It is the opposite of anticompetitive.

manigandham 6y ago
Higher search result page placement required AMP (in the news carousel).

bradgessler 6y ago

I’ll never understand why a search engine doesn’t just adjust its ranking algorithms to penalize websites that load slowly and perform poorly. For example, why not rank https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en above https://cnn.com/ https://cnn.com/?

colejohnson66 6y ago
Supposedly, Google does do that. It doesn’t work that well when everyone is bloated though.

nomel 6y ago

When AMP first came out in 2015, I had a mobile internet plan with some pretty extreme data caps with throttling down to LTE after they were exceeded. I absolutely loved AMP. I imagine I was in the target audience.