14 ms·

The End of AMP?

371 points by colinprince 6y ago

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Blah blah "AMP is bad." I could agree with the performance sentiment if it were directed at the real issue: One-click-and-you-now-have-amp solutions, which is like 99% of AMP pages using WordPress.
- yrrr 6y ago
  Google sequestering the URL is bad.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    Exactly, Google <-- is bad. I don't see how this gets mixed up with AMP.
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      They're not separable, though. AMP entirely depends on the existence of Google in order to see any benefit from it, even without cacheing layer. Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance; if they did, I would have explained to them that we already could have good performance now if they stopped asking us to overload their pages with tracking scripts, ads, and other useless crap, and allowed engineers the time to address performance issues. Without Google, AMP alone doesn't have the speed or the technical advantage to make it worth it. Google's neatest trick is their attempt at framing AMP as something akin to an open-source project that has nothing to do with them when, in reality, it has everything to do with them. P.S. AMP does give engineers an out by allowing them to build pages from scratch without the cruft imposed upon the OG pages by their employers, but this could be easily avoided by product owners making better(and rather obvious) decisions rather than always making the more exciting ones that cause a lot of dilly dallying and technical debt. Still, at the end of the day, on its own is just busy-work.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        The advantage of AMP is precisely this: when an executive wants to put fifty tracking scripts of various sorts on an AMP page, the developers can say “this is impossible, Google doesn’t allow this”. When it’s on your site’s own page, the developer doesn’t have this leverage.
      - GuB-42 6y ago
        > Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance; And that's exactly why I can't hate AMP. Publishers don't give a fuck about performance, and user experience in general as long as they get clicks that can be monetized. They don't want to keep users for their quality content, they want to game search engine results and trap users when they get in. Things like AMP seems to be the only way to make publishers care. Seen the other way, Google have seen the mess, and took advantage of it and made AMP, which both addresses the problem and get them a comfortable position. If sites were fast the problem wouldn't be there in the first place, and Google would have had to find something else for their monopoly. And sure, what you said in your PS is true. Unfortunately, that's not how things are. I don't know why, greed maybe? But if it is the case, it is the stupid kind of greed, because now, publishers are struggling and Google is making shittons of money.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Did it occur to you that nobody would ever refactor their pages to AMP markup to begin with, had Google not decided to give AMP preferential treatment? AMP is the symptom of the problem, which is Google and its monopoly on search.
Lucasoato 6y ago
> Let me package that up for you – Google, the most dominant search engine globally – used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain. It's absurd, how could regulators and authorities let this happen? Let's also mention how hard and counterintuitive is getting to the original site from the amp version.
- brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
  Tech literacy isn't exactly rampant. It's sad really and part of the reason we have memes like the "internet is a series of tubes" and laws like the DMCA in the US.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Literacy isn't the problem, campaign finance is. Google spreads around money to both sides of the aisle at basically the legal maximum level.
- godelmachine 6y ago
  >>Let's also mention how hard and counterintuitive is getting to the original site from the amp version I stopped using Chrome as my primary browser and moved to Firefox for exactly same reason - AMP.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    I simply moved to DDG as my default search engine on mobile for the same reason.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Oh, now I understand why I've never encountered AMP or had reason to complain about it.
      - deleted 6y ago
flying_sheep 6y ago
I was thinking why the f*k all the websites were turning into g*gle.com domain? That breaks all the link sharing. I thought if this is the problem of the mobile Safari. Turns out it is G*gle's evil plan to dominate all the WWW traffics :-/
- ec109685 6y ago
  Safari will auto-expand the AMP link to the deep link, so at least within iOS's default browser and using its share sheet, AMP doesn't break link sharing.
  - flying_sheep 6y ago
    I usually copy link via long-press the location bar which is not auto converted. Besides AMP pages break horizontal scrolling in some page as well. For example: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/ca.finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/explainer-why-biden-halting-federal-153945872.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/ca.finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/new... You can scroll left and right but it is not supposed to. Some app will also render wrong thumbnail for AMP links as well. Altogether AMP makes the UX much worse :-/
godelmachine 6y ago
Just in case someone is excitedly expecting that AMP is going away (like I did :p), sorry beforehand to burst your bubble - >>Part of the Google update is that all pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  This is disturbing. I think it is up to people like the ones who read hacker news to at least raise awareness of the issue with ordinary people. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the monopoly power of Google but aren't sure exactly what is wrong with it.
- tyingq 6y ago
  It may end up being the same thing. Publishers reluctantly used AMP because of the carousel placement. Depending on the effort to revert, removing the incentive may effectively kill AMP.
  - underwater 6y ago
    Publishers absolutely want to take people to their main site, not the AMP facsimile. If Google actually do what they say here, this will kill AMP.
    - what_ever 6y ago
      You are very optimistic about publishers actually making the websites fast. (like just how they did before AMP existed). Disc: Googler but not associated with AMP whatsoever.
      - underwater 6y ago
        Publishers have shown that they can devote developer effort when there is a clear ROI. Google just need to make the criteria for inclusion in the carousel understandable and measurable.
valine 6y ago
Google AMP breaks full screen safari and reader mode on iPhone. I've gotten so fed up with it that I've set google.com to always load as desktop. Search results are smaller and harder to read, but it's well worth the tradeoffs IMO.
- jibbers 6y ago
  I'll be that person. Have you tried DuckDuckGo? No AMP and their "bangs" are great.
  - valine 6y ago
    Yeah I try every ddg every six months or so. Their results are getting better but I still find myself using g! enough that it's annoying.
    - NegativeLatency 6y ago
      Amp was what pushed me over the line to using it full time
ncann 6y ago
As a user, I don't have any complaint for news sites using AMP. But Reddit links using AMP is a crime against humanity, and I search Reddit threads using Google a lot.
- AnssiH 6y ago
  I guess you probably do not read article comments? For some reason I almost always want to read them, and most of the time the AMP version does not have them, and most of the time there is no way to get to the non-AMP version. Example from my Google feed: https://www-tomshardware-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/intel-11th-gen-rocket-lake-s-specifications-pricing?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1 https://www-tomshardware-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.toms...
  - ncann 6y ago
    You're right, I don't tend to read comments on articles themselves. In fact I don't even know if many of the news sites I frequent (CBC, BBC) have comment section or not. But I can totally see that being a usability issue with AMP if that's what you're into.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Absolutely, and honestly I blame reddit much more than AMP there. AMP was clearly not created for the sort of dynamic page like reddit. Honestly, looking at reddit's mobile page in general, it's clear that they try to make it as awful of an experience as possible to get people onto the app, which is common with some sites.
luxuryballs 6y ago
Amp sucks and IMO is a broken concept counter to the way the internet is supposed to work... case in point the only thing I use it for is to link Epoch Times articles since it bypasses the required login prompt.
api 6y ago
AMP has been #1 on my list of web/Internet things that I hoped would fail since it emerged. It was a transparent attempt to start walled-gardening the web.
bla3 6y ago
AMP exists not because it's impossible to build fast web sites without it, but because it's possible to build slow web sites without it. Which means most big sites not using AMP are slow because most places don't have direct incentives for keeping their stuff fast. Against all odds, AMP convinced these sites to build an alternative experience that's reasonably fast. It's good that AMP is no longer required to get good rankings for fast pages. That was always a silly requirement. But from a user's point of view, I'm grateful for AMP, despite that being an unpopular opinion around here.
- random5634 6y ago
  Same - despite all the hate I liked AMP. Hackers / developers seem to insist on the non-AMP sites to bloat sites to absolute trash and back. If I saw the amp logo, I knew that was the one to click. Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for, but AMP forcing these developers into a much smaller box that they can't screw with users as much on I just loved AMP. I think a lot of the HN hate comes because AMP I think prohibits random third party javascript ad libraries. So obviously it hits folks where it hurts, but the web is much nicer to browse without all the junk.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for The thing people were offended by wasn't the lack of bloat, it was the fact that it was ceding even more control to Google.
    - random5634 6y ago
      But yet these users never deploy a non-google debloated world. Billing on line is the same thing. Unless you are on a trusted site (Amazon / Apple) you can just get hosed trying to cancel subscriptions with jack up pricing etc. Same thing with spam - at some point users stopped trusting the hackers and developers and migrated to more controlled worlds (ie, gmail etc) which blocks HUGE quantities of the junk. I just wish hackers spent some time trying to make users experience and lives better rather than the constant push to spam them (EFF wanted to pass laws banning anti-spam measures), now AMP (which was amazing) is being attacked endlessly and the list goes on. Google has a commercial reason for pushing this stuff - the web was turning into a trash bit (flyover ads with audio etc etc).
tootie 6y ago
I wonder if there's space for CDNs to fill in some of that use case without the monopolism. Having a slimmed down experience geared directly for people landing from search makes a lot of sense.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Even better, just go straight to the slimmed down experience, regardless of where the visitor is coming from.
  - tootie 6y ago
    There's a hierarchy of users. Users who search a topic and land on your site are the least engaged. They don't know your site, they just want to snack on your content and bounce. You can either milk them for revenue or try to convince them to stay. Anyone who either lands directly on your site or is navigating page to page is partly engaged. Middle of the funnel and a step away from identifying themselves. Next step is to collect an email address or even a login. These are the folks you build your experience around.
meibo 6y ago
> publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. Great joke. Visit any non-amp news site and tell me that one again. The only, major benefit AMP brought to the internet is that it was legitimately light and fast.
- Angostura 6y ago
  news.bbc.co.uk
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  A lot of news sites are instantaneous now, without amp, simply because now there are a business incentive to be fast.
satyrnein 6y ago
Once AMP is not favored by Google Search, and ideally Signed Exchange works in all browsers (to fix the domain name issue), AMP might actually become an unambiguously good thing: just another option to speed your page up.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Did Firefox and Apple change their position on signed exchanges? Both were pretty negative about it as I recall.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    I suspect that once supporting Signed Exchanges in their browsers no longer has the risk of indirectly benefiting Google, we'll see Mozilla and Apple suddenly drop their highly principled technical objections to the specification. Sadly it is at this point that Google will also decide that this neutral and open technology is not actually worth pursuing for the good of humanity after all, and will remove support for it from Chrome. This is a pity, as it would be nice if sites could sign their content with an offline key, to avoid the risks of compromised web hosts. Even better would be if browsers let you pin a version of a web app and only accept signed upgrades if you opted-in, to further protect against hacked or coerced use of the signing key.
    - danielscrubs 6y ago
      For others that want to get more information: “ In one given scenario, if an attacker is able to obtain the private key used to sign a particular website for Signed Exchanges, that attacker can then deliver false websites that appear in almost every way to be legitimate. Considering this false page in no way connects to the valid server, it would be difficult for admins to even detect. Additionally, Mozilla has publicly shared its stance that Signed Exchanges are “harmful” and will not be implemented in Firefox as currently specified. In particular, they take issue with a browser serving a particular website without connecting to its original source (or “authoritative server”). Mozilla has concerns about the shift in the web security model required for handling web-packaged information. Specifically, the ability for an origin to act on behalf of another without a client ever contacting the authoritative server is worrisome, as is the removal of a guarantee of confidentiality from the web security model (the host serving the web package has access to plain text). We recognise that the use cases satisfied by web packaging are useful, and would be likely to support an approach that enabled such use cases so long as the foregoing concerns could be addressed. A leader of Apple’s Safari development team, Maciej Stachowiak, recently backed Mozilla’s stance, adding an almost humorously phrased explanation of what Signed Exchanges for AMP really is. But even so, I’d say we are pretty uncomfortable with this approach, for similar reasons to Mozilla. We can see some advantages to Google re-serving the whole web from their own servers and getting browsers to present it as if it comes from the origin, but it also seems like a worrisome change to the web security model. ” https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-signed-exchanges/ https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-s... for those of you who want to your support the middleman: http://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-signed-exchanges/ http://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-...
jonnydubowsky 6y ago
The author of this post (Dwayne Lafleur) has a linked post on additional changes being made in the Google update. All pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. His call to action is pretty straightforward: "Get to work right now to ensure that your site has a great user experience AND has a great user experience score. Avoid unnecessary JavaScript, plugins and bloat, and make your site easy-to-use". https://www.lafoo.com/javascript-is-driving-your-visitors-crazy/ https://www.lafoo.com/javascript-is-driving-your-visitors-cr...
ec109685 6y ago
This is disingenuous given that's not how Google AMP works when viewing an article on its search results: > Both sites are measurably worse on their AMP versions. The amount of data transferred is higher, the script execution is worse, and the page takes longer to load. So much for the promise of speed and a better user experience. AMP pages render instantly because Google is able to pre-cache their data. So you're not paying the same price at click as you do when you go to a non-amp page. Yes, AMP doesn't make sense as a tech to render your main site when a user directly visits it, but for embedding your content into another's experience, it does allow for very fast load times.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  The whole article is riddled with lies and misleading points. > they didn’t go to BBC’s website; they view a copy of the BBC’s content on google.com That's exactly what a CDN is. The only difference between AMP cache and CloudFlare is that the latter uses some DNS trickery to show BBC's domain name, whereas Google can't. Google solved this in Chrome, and there are other ways to solve this with Web Packages [1] and Signed HTTP exchanges which allows the content to be served from Google but with the original url, without DNS changes. [1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...
  - majewsky 6y ago
    The difference is that the BBC is a customer of CloudFlare, and that contractual relationship provides a sound legal basis for CloudFlare serving the BBC's content. There is nothing of the sort between the BBC and Google in the AMP case, just a shaky implied-in-fact contract along the lines of "if you put AMP on your website, you consent to us pretending that we're you and serving it to people on your behalf".
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Cloudflare also doesn't shove their own UI into the top of your page and hijack left/right swipes on your page.
tamrix 6y ago
I mean, at least make this opt-in if you want the Amp experience. Forcing this on users should be a crime.
millstone 6y ago
Google could defuse some of the AMP pushback by offering users a setting to disable it. Why haven't they done so?
- rchaud 6y ago
  Because mandatory opt-in has a higher conversion rate than opt-out.
osrec 6y ago
I sure hope it is the end of AMP (even though it was launched by a close friend of mine at Google). Quite honestly, the concept never really made any sense to me, and often the load speeds were just as poor as the original website itself. One thing that really bugged me was how disorientating it was for the user; on some AMP pages, you literally could not tell if you were on a legitimate website or some spoofed version. The AMP bar at the top was about as trashy a UI design as I've seen since 1997. And, God help you if you wanted to share the link - it was hard to know if the AMP link would be "persistent" or "sticky" enough to share, or whether you should go to the actual underlying web page (which the AMP bar did a great job of hiding) and share that. But what is most annoying of all is that smart people at Google were kidding themselves that their botched up implementation of AMP was a great thing to have launched upon the world. It really was not. I bet it didn't really do much for their bottom line either.
- JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
  The amount of effort it can take to the the actual link to the article is just insane. Trying to share something through your phone that has been AMP'd is basically signaling it's not worth the effort to send the article at all. Add that to how untrustworthy the link looks, it's just terrible execution on an idea that might have merit.
  - what_ever 6y ago
    That's not been my experience on Android. I just opened an AMP link from Google search which opened in Chrome based WebView. Clicking on share - how I usually share things - presented me with the actual link of the article. From there I could copy or open any of the apps to actually share the link. AFAIK, this has been long fixed. Disc: Googler.
    - ec109685 6y ago
      On iOS it is the same way. Apple also figures out the canonical link and shares that.
    - 6y ago
pembrook 6y ago
The most simple and least expensive solution for Google, if they actually cared about making the web faster, would have been to simply enforce more strict page-weight rules via the search algorithm. The fact that they didn't do that, tells us that Google is either: A) Stupid and inefficient, because creating AMP cost 100X more than a simple search algorithm change Or B) Trying to achieve something more nefarious with AMP, something that is worth the extra cost, and that they weren't telling us about. After seeing the Texas lawsuit against them, it's pretty clear to my eyes that the answer is B.
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  Search speed was already a ranking factor. It didn't have much effect on publishers, who continued to bloat their pages. As for why they didn't just "dial it up to 11", I'm guessing that would cause the quality of their search results to go down.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    > As for why they didn't just "dial it up to 11", I'm guessing that would cause the quality of their search results to go down. How would announcing preferential treatment for sites under X kb in weight have been any different than preferential treatment for sites using AMP? Both would have required similar action from the dev teams at these publishers.
    - SquareWheel 6y ago
      AMP's SEO advantage wasn't in organic results, but a separate search vertical ("the carousel") placed above-the-fold. So as mentioned, introducing a new vertical also allowed Google to sidestep any issues of hurting organic results. In addition, the carousel was a much more desirable placement for publishers to chase. It made them pay attention more than a small ranking factor bump would have. I do however disagree with Google's decision to implement this. I feel it's one of the legitimate criticisms of AMP, and it took them far too long to fix it.
rchaud 6y ago
Fortunately for me, 95% of AMP pages that show up on my search results are low-quality news websites crawling with ads and the Taboola chumbox, or pages stuffed with affiliate links like "Best Protein Powders for 2021". Search results that appear on the AMP carousel are generally not websites I would visit. But maybe that's the point?
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
AMP improved pages mostly by forcing publishers to start from scratch. They needed to get something out the door, so they made a minimum viable version, without all the cruft and trackers. Then they started cramming more and more of that into the AMP version, despite AMP making that hard. Giving better placement for the main page version won't be as effective, because it doesn't force them to start from scratch. At best, we'll see some incremental improvements. I've seen an ad that managed to consume so many resources that Chrome blocked it. Reducing the threshold for that blocking would be much more effective.
Grimm1 6y ago
Not to say this was entirely predictable, but it was entirely predictable. Myself and pretty much the bulk of my larger circle have been saying this was Google's goal with AMP for years now and that speeding up mobile pages must have been very early on co-opted to make more ad revenue anti-competitively. Good to see it being out in the open and included in the lawsuit no less. I certainly share the sentiment of the author and hope this is the start of the end for AMP.
cletus 6y ago
Usually the answer is "no" to any question in a headline. My answer is "I sure hope so". AMP launched in 2015. At that time, Larry Page was CEO, Eric Schmidt was Chairman and David Drummond was the Chief Legal Officer. I don't know how any of them signed off on AMP. Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created. For a company that is (or should be) very careful about attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems completely reckless. And what is the upside for Google here? Fast pages? That seems like one hell of a gamble. And on the user side? I, as a user, absolutely hate AMP and wish I could opt out. I have poor vision so use larger fonts on iOS. AMP pages routinely render with the edge of pages cropped off and you can't scroll so here so this happens to me way too often: 1. Click on a link 2. Get an AMP page 3. Can't read the page, click back 4. Force touch the link to bring up the preview of the page, which is the non-AMP version 5. Click on that preview to get the non-AMP page. Why is this still an issue? Why can't I just get this version of the page always? It's ludicrous. But I honestly don't know why Google pushed so hard on AMP.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- wayneftw 6y ago
  Here's the solution I've been using on my phone for a long while now: Permanently put Google into desktop mode on my phone. My only real issue with this workaround is image search where I have to turn my phone sideways to see the images.
- pnt12 6y ago
  Agree with pretty much all you said, but where were the lawsuits? Pessimistically, seems to be yet another case of a huge company doing something awful with absolutely no consequence. What has the last time Google was punished? The biggest threat to its business model was the gdrp and it has achieved next to nothing.
shujito 6y ago
I forgot AMP existed because I now use duck instead of google
sexy_seedbox 6y ago
I never see AMP using Kiwi Browser with its "Remove AMP" privacy feature.
fouc 6y ago
I don't see AMP sites because I don't use google search. I prefer Duckduckgo and Safari over Google Search & Chrome
deleted 6y ago
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371 points by colinprince 6y ago

Blah blah "AMP is bad." I could agree with the performance sentiment if it were directed at the real issue: One-click-and-you-now-have-amp solutions, which is like 99% of AMP pages using WordPress.

yrrr 6y ago
Google sequestering the URL is bad.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Exactly, Google <-- is bad. I don't see how this gets mixed up with AMP.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    They're not separable, though. AMP entirely depends on the existence of Google in order to see any benefit from it, even without cacheing layer. Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance; if they did, I would have explained to them that we already could have good performance now if they stopped asking us to overload their pages with tracking scripts, ads, and other useless crap, and allowed engineers the time to address performance issues. Without Google, AMP alone doesn't have the speed or the technical advantage to make it worth it. Google's neatest trick is their attempt at framing AMP as something akin to an open-source project that has nothing to do with them when, in reality, it has everything to do with them. P.S. AMP does give engineers an out by allowing them to build pages from scratch without the cruft imposed upon the OG pages by their employers, but this could be easily avoided by product owners making better(and rather obvious) decisions rather than always making the more exciting ones that cause a lot of dilly dallying and technical debt. Still, at the end of the day, on its own is just busy-work.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The advantage of AMP is precisely this: when an executive wants to put fifty tracking scripts of various sorts on an AMP page, the developers can say “this is impossible, Google doesn’t allow this”. When it’s on your site’s own page, the developer doesn’t have this leverage.
    - GuB-42 6y ago
      > Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance; And that's exactly why I can't hate AMP. Publishers don't give a fuck about performance, and user experience in general as long as they get clicks that can be monetized. They don't want to keep users for their quality content, they want to game search engine results and trap users when they get in. Things like AMP seems to be the only way to make publishers care. Seen the other way, Google have seen the mess, and took advantage of it and made AMP, which both addresses the problem and get them a comfortable position. If sites were fast the problem wouldn't be there in the first place, and Google would have had to find something else for their monopoly. And sure, what you said in your PS is true. Unfortunately, that's not how things are. I don't know why, greed maybe? But if it is the case, it is the stupid kind of greed, because now, publishers are struggling and Google is making shittons of money.
rchaud 6y ago
Did it occur to you that nobody would ever refactor their pages to AMP markup to begin with, had Google not decided to give AMP preferential treatment? AMP is the symptom of the problem, which is Google and its monopoly on search.

Lucasoato 6y ago

> Let me package that up for you – Google, the most dominant search engine globally – used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain. It's absurd, how could regulators and authorities let this happen? Let's also mention how hard and counterintuitive is getting to the original site from the amp version.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
Tech literacy isn't exactly rampant. It's sad really and part of the reason we have memes like the "internet is a series of tubes" and laws like the DMCA in the US.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Literacy isn't the problem, campaign finance is. Google spreads around money to both sides of the aisle at basically the legal maximum level.
godelmachine 6y ago
>>Let's also mention how hard and counterintuitive is getting to the original site from the amp version I stopped using Chrome as my primary browser and moved to Firefox for exactly same reason - AMP.
- Angostura 6y ago
  I simply moved to DDG as my default search engine on mobile for the same reason.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Oh, now I understand why I've never encountered AMP or had reason to complain about it.
    - deleted 6y ago

flying_sheep 6y ago

I was thinking why the f*k all the websites were turning into g*gle.com domain? That breaks all the link sharing. I thought if this is the problem of the mobile Safari. Turns out it is G*gle's evil plan to dominate all the WWW traffics :-/

ec109685 6y ago
Safari will auto-expand the AMP link to the deep link, so at least within iOS's default browser and using its share sheet, AMP doesn't break link sharing.
- flying_sheep 6y ago
  I usually copy link via long-press the location bar which is not auto converted. Besides AMP pages break horizontal scrolling in some page as well. For example: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/ca.finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/explainer-why-biden-halting-federal-153945872.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/ca.finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/new... You can scroll left and right but it is not supposed to. Some app will also render wrong thumbnail for AMP links as well. Altogether AMP makes the UX much worse :-/

godelmachine 6y ago

Just in case someone is excitedly expecting that AMP is going away (like I did :p), sorry beforehand to burst your bubble - >>Part of the Google update is that all pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains

georgeecollins 6y ago
This is disturbing. I think it is up to people like the ones who read hacker news to at least raise awareness of the issue with ordinary people. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the monopoly power of Google but aren't sure exactly what is wrong with it.
tyingq 6y ago
It may end up being the same thing. Publishers reluctantly used AMP because of the carousel placement. Depending on the effort to revert, removing the incentive may effectively kill AMP.
- underwater 6y ago
  Publishers absolutely want to take people to their main site, not the AMP facsimile. If Google actually do what they say here, this will kill AMP.
  - what_ever 6y ago
    You are very optimistic about publishers actually making the websites fast. (like just how they did before AMP existed). Disc: Googler but not associated with AMP whatsoever.
    - underwater 6y ago
      Publishers have shown that they can devote developer effort when there is a clear ROI. Google just need to make the criteria for inclusion in the carousel understandable and measurable.

valine 6y ago

Google AMP breaks full screen safari and reader mode on iPhone. I've gotten so fed up with it that I've set google.com to always load as desktop. Search results are smaller and harder to read, but it's well worth the tradeoffs IMO.

jibbers 6y ago
I'll be that person. Have you tried DuckDuckGo? No AMP and their "bangs" are great.
- valine 6y ago
  Yeah I try every ddg every six months or so. Their results are getting better but I still find myself using g! enough that it's annoying.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    Amp was what pushed me over the line to using it full time

ncann 6y ago

As a user, I don't have any complaint for news sites using AMP. But Reddit links using AMP is a crime against humanity, and I search Reddit threads using Google a lot.

AnssiH 6y ago
I guess you probably do not read article comments? For some reason I almost always want to read them, and most of the time the AMP version does not have them, and most of the time there is no way to get to the non-AMP version. Example from my Google feed: https://www-tomshardware-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/intel-11th-gen-rocket-lake-s-specifications-pricing?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1 https://www-tomshardware-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.toms...
- ncann 6y ago
  You're right, I don't tend to read comments on articles themselves. In fact I don't even know if many of the news sites I frequent (CBC, BBC) have comment section or not. But I can totally see that being a usability issue with AMP if that's what you're into.
ehsankia 6y ago
Absolutely, and honestly I blame reddit much more than AMP there. AMP was clearly not created for the sort of dynamic page like reddit. Honestly, looking at reddit's mobile page in general, it's clear that they try to make it as awful of an experience as possible to get people onto the app, which is common with some sites.

luxuryballs 6y ago

Amp sucks and IMO is a broken concept counter to the way the internet is supposed to work... case in point the only thing I use it for is to link Epoch Times articles since it bypasses the required login prompt.

api 6y ago

AMP has been #1 on my list of web/Internet things that I hoped would fail since it emerged. It was a transparent attempt to start walled-gardening the web.

bla3 6y ago

AMP exists not because it's impossible to build fast web sites without it, but because it's possible to build slow web sites without it. Which means most big sites not using AMP are slow because most places don't have direct incentives for keeping their stuff fast. Against all odds, AMP convinced these sites to build an alternative experience that's reasonably fast. It's good that AMP is no longer required to get good rankings for fast pages. That was always a silly requirement. But from a user's point of view, I'm grateful for AMP, despite that being an unpopular opinion around here.

random5634 6y ago
Same - despite all the hate I liked AMP. Hackers / developers seem to insist on the non-AMP sites to bloat sites to absolute trash and back. If I saw the amp logo, I knew that was the one to click. Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for, but AMP forcing these developers into a much smaller box that they can't screw with users as much on I just loved AMP. I think a lot of the HN hate comes because AMP I think prohibits random third party javascript ad libraries. So obviously it hits folks where it hurts, but the web is much nicer to browse without all the junk.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for The thing people were offended by wasn't the lack of bloat, it was the fact that it was ceding even more control to Google.
  - random5634 6y ago
    But yet these users never deploy a non-google debloated world. Billing on line is the same thing. Unless you are on a trusted site (Amazon / Apple) you can just get hosed trying to cancel subscriptions with jack up pricing etc. Same thing with spam - at some point users stopped trusting the hackers and developers and migrated to more controlled worlds (ie, gmail etc) which blocks HUGE quantities of the junk. I just wish hackers spent some time trying to make users experience and lives better rather than the constant push to spam them (EFF wanted to pass laws banning anti-spam measures), now AMP (which was amazing) is being attacked endlessly and the list goes on. Google has a commercial reason for pushing this stuff - the web was turning into a trash bit (flyover ads with audio etc etc).

tootie 6y ago

I wonder if there's space for CDNs to fill in some of that use case without the monopolism. Having a slimmed down experience geared directly for people landing from search makes a lot of sense.

Shared404 6y ago
Even better, just go straight to the slimmed down experience, regardless of where the visitor is coming from.
- tootie 6y ago
  There's a hierarchy of users. Users who search a topic and land on your site are the least engaged. They don't know your site, they just want to snack on your content and bounce. You can either milk them for revenue or try to convince them to stay. Anyone who either lands directly on your site or is navigating page to page is partly engaged. Middle of the funnel and a step away from identifying themselves. Next step is to collect an email address or even a login. These are the folks you build your experience around.

meibo 6y ago

> publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. Great joke. Visit any non-amp news site and tell me that one again. The only, major benefit AMP brought to the internet is that it was legitimately light and fast.

Angostura 6y ago
news.bbc.co.uk
danielscrubs 6y ago
A lot of news sites are instantaneous now, without amp, simply because now there are a business incentive to be fast.

satyrnein 6y ago

Once AMP is not favored by Google Search, and ideally Signed Exchange works in all browsers (to fix the domain name issue), AMP might actually become an unambiguously good thing: just another option to speed your page up.

tyingq 6y ago
Did Firefox and Apple change their position on signed exchanges? Both were pretty negative about it as I recall.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  I suspect that once supporting Signed Exchanges in their browsers no longer has the risk of indirectly benefiting Google, we'll see Mozilla and Apple suddenly drop their highly principled technical objections to the specification. Sadly it is at this point that Google will also decide that this neutral and open technology is not actually worth pursuing for the good of humanity after all, and will remove support for it from Chrome. This is a pity, as it would be nice if sites could sign their content with an offline key, to avoid the risks of compromised web hosts. Even better would be if browsers let you pin a version of a web app and only accept signed upgrades if you opted-in, to further protect against hacked or coerced use of the signing key.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    For others that want to get more information: “ In one given scenario, if an attacker is able to obtain the private key used to sign a particular website for Signed Exchanges, that attacker can then deliver false websites that appear in almost every way to be legitimate. Considering this false page in no way connects to the valid server, it would be difficult for admins to even detect. Additionally, Mozilla has publicly shared its stance that Signed Exchanges are “harmful” and will not be implemented in Firefox as currently specified. In particular, they take issue with a browser serving a particular website without connecting to its original source (or “authoritative server”). Mozilla has concerns about the shift in the web security model required for handling web-packaged information. Specifically, the ability for an origin to act on behalf of another without a client ever contacting the authoritative server is worrisome, as is the removal of a guarantee of confidentiality from the web security model (the host serving the web package has access to plain text). We recognise that the use cases satisfied by web packaging are useful, and would be likely to support an approach that enabled such use cases so long as the foregoing concerns could be addressed. A leader of Apple’s Safari development team, Maciej Stachowiak, recently backed Mozilla’s stance, adding an almost humorously phrased explanation of what Signed Exchanges for AMP really is. But even so, I’d say we are pretty uncomfortable with this approach, for similar reasons to Mozilla. We can see some advantages to Google re-serving the whole web from their own servers and getting browsers to present it as if it comes from the origin, but it also seems like a worrisome change to the web security model. ” https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-signed-exchanges/ https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-s... for those of you who want to your support the middleman: http://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-signed-exchanges/ http://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-...

jonnydubowsky 6y ago

The author of this post (Dwayne Lafleur) has a linked post on additional changes being made in the Google update. All pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. His call to action is pretty straightforward: "Get to work right now to ensure that your site has a great user experience AND has a great user experience score. Avoid unnecessary JavaScript, plugins and bloat, and make your site easy-to-use". https://www.lafoo.com/javascript-is-driving-your-visitors-crazy/ https://www.lafoo.com/javascript-is-driving-your-visitors-cr...

ec109685 6y ago

This is disingenuous given that's not how Google AMP works when viewing an article on its search results: > Both sites are measurably worse on their AMP versions. The amount of data transferred is higher, the script execution is worse, and the page takes longer to load. So much for the promise of speed and a better user experience. AMP pages render instantly because Google is able to pre-cache their data. So you're not paying the same price at click as you do when you go to a non-amp page. Yes, AMP doesn't make sense as a tech to render your main site when a user directly visits it, but for embedding your content into another's experience, it does allow for very fast load times.

ehsankia 6y ago
The whole article is riddled with lies and misleading points. > they didn’t go to BBC’s website; they view a copy of the BBC’s content on google.com That's exactly what a CDN is. The only difference between AMP cache and CloudFlare is that the latter uses some DNS trickery to show BBC's domain name, whereas Google can't. Google solved this in Chrome, and there are other ways to solve this with Web Packages [1] and Signed HTTP exchanges which allows the content to be served from Google but with the original url, without DNS changes. [1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...
- majewsky 6y ago
  The difference is that the BBC is a customer of CloudFlare, and that contractual relationship provides a sound legal basis for CloudFlare serving the BBC's content. There is nothing of the sort between the BBC and Google in the AMP case, just a shaky implied-in-fact contract along the lines of "if you put AMP on your website, you consent to us pretending that we're you and serving it to people on your behalf".
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Cloudflare also doesn't shove their own UI into the top of your page and hijack left/right swipes on your page.

tamrix 6y ago

I mean, at least make this opt-in if you want the Amp experience. Forcing this on users should be a crime.

millstone 6y ago

Google could defuse some of the AMP pushback by offering users a setting to disable it. Why haven't they done so?

rchaud 6y ago
Because mandatory opt-in has a higher conversion rate than opt-out.

osrec 6y ago

I sure hope it is the end of AMP (even though it was launched by a close friend of mine at Google). Quite honestly, the concept never really made any sense to me, and often the load speeds were just as poor as the original website itself. One thing that really bugged me was how disorientating it was for the user; on some AMP pages, you literally could not tell if you were on a legitimate website or some spoofed version. The AMP bar at the top was about as trashy a UI design as I've seen since 1997. And, God help you if you wanted to share the link - it was hard to know if the AMP link would be "persistent" or "sticky" enough to share, or whether you should go to the actual underlying web page (which the AMP bar did a great job of hiding) and share that. But what is most annoying of all is that smart people at Google were kidding themselves that their botched up implementation of AMP was a great thing to have launched upon the world. It really was not. I bet it didn't really do much for their bottom line either.

JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
The amount of effort it can take to the the actual link to the article is just insane. Trying to share something through your phone that has been AMP'd is basically signaling it's not worth the effort to send the article at all. Add that to how untrustworthy the link looks, it's just terrible execution on an idea that might have merit.
- what_ever 6y ago
  That's not been my experience on Android. I just opened an AMP link from Google search which opened in Chrome based WebView. Clicking on share - how I usually share things - presented me with the actual link of the article. From there I could copy or open any of the apps to actually share the link. AFAIK, this has been long fixed. Disc: Googler.
  - ec109685 6y ago
    On iOS it is the same way. Apple also figures out the canonical link and shares that.
  - 6y ago

pembrook 6y ago

The most simple and least expensive solution for Google, if they actually cared about making the web faster, would have been to simply enforce more strict page-weight rules via the search algorithm. The fact that they didn't do that, tells us that Google is either: A) Stupid and inefficient, because creating AMP cost 100X more than a simple search algorithm change Or B) Trying to achieve something more nefarious with AMP, something that is worth the extra cost, and that they weren't telling us about. After seeing the Texas lawsuit against them, it's pretty clear to my eyes that the answer is B.

SquareWheel 6y ago
Search speed was already a ranking factor. It didn't have much effect on publishers, who continued to bloat their pages. As for why they didn't just "dial it up to 11", I'm guessing that would cause the quality of their search results to go down.
- pembrook 6y ago
  > As for why they didn't just "dial it up to 11", I'm guessing that would cause the quality of their search results to go down. How would announcing preferential treatment for sites under X kb in weight have been any different than preferential treatment for sites using AMP? Both would have required similar action from the dev teams at these publishers.
  - SquareWheel 6y ago
    AMP's SEO advantage wasn't in organic results, but a separate search vertical ("the carousel") placed above-the-fold. So as mentioned, introducing a new vertical also allowed Google to sidestep any issues of hurting organic results. In addition, the carousel was a much more desirable placement for publishers to chase. It made them pay attention more than a small ranking factor bump would have. I do however disagree with Google's decision to implement this. I feel it's one of the legitimate criticisms of AMP, and it took them far too long to fix it.

rchaud 6y ago

Fortunately for me, 95% of AMP pages that show up on my search results are low-quality news websites crawling with ads and the Taboola chumbox, or pages stuffed with affiliate links like "Best Protein Powders for 2021". Search results that appear on the AMP carousel are generally not websites I would visit. But maybe that's the point?

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

AMP improved pages mostly by forcing publishers to start from scratch. They needed to get something out the door, so they made a minimum viable version, without all the cruft and trackers. Then they started cramming more and more of that into the AMP version, despite AMP making that hard. Giving better placement for the main page version won't be as effective, because it doesn't force them to start from scratch. At best, we'll see some incremental improvements. I've seen an ad that managed to consume so many resources that Chrome blocked it. Reducing the threshold for that blocking would be much more effective.

Grimm1 6y ago

Not to say this was entirely predictable, but it was entirely predictable. Myself and pretty much the bulk of my larger circle have been saying this was Google's goal with AMP for years now and that speeding up mobile pages must have been very early on co-opted to make more ad revenue anti-competitively. Good to see it being out in the open and included in the lawsuit no less. I certainly share the sentiment of the author and hope this is the start of the end for AMP.

cletus 6y ago

Usually the answer is "no" to any question in a headline. My answer is "I sure hope so". AMP launched in 2015. At that time, Larry Page was CEO, Eric Schmidt was Chairman and David Drummond was the Chief Legal Officer. I don't know how any of them signed off on AMP. Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created. For a company that is (or should be) very careful about attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems completely reckless. And what is the upside for Google here? Fast pages? That seems like one hell of a gamble. And on the user side? I, as a user, absolutely hate AMP and wish I could opt out. I have poor vision so use larger fonts on iOS. AMP pages routinely render with the edge of pages cropped off and you can't scroll so here so this happens to me way too often: 1. Click on a link 2. Get an AMP page 3. Can't read the page, click back 4. Force touch the link to bring up the preview of the page, which is the non-AMP version 5. Click on that preview to get the non-AMP page. Why is this still an issue? Why can't I just get this version of the page always? It's ludicrous. But I honestly don't know why Google pushed so hard on AMP.

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wayneftw 6y ago
Here's the solution I've been using on my phone for a long while now: Permanently put Google into desktop mode on my phone. My only real issue with this workaround is image search where I have to turn my phone sideways to see the images.
pnt12 6y ago
Agree with pretty much all you said, but where were the lawsuits? Pessimistically, seems to be yet another case of a huge company doing something awful with absolutely no consequence. What has the last time Google was punished? The biggest threat to its business model was the gdrp and it has achieved next to nothing.

shujito 6y ago

I forgot AMP existed because I now use duck instead of google

sexy_seedbox 6y ago

I never see AMP using Kiwi Browser with its "Remove AMP" privacy feature.

fouc 6y ago

I don't see AMP sites because I don't use google search. I prefer Duckduckgo and Safari over Google Search & Chrome

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