14 ms·

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 si

by 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).
    - m8s 6y ago
      Which users? What a sweeping generalization. Your disdain for some mythical group of people is very odd. Besides, does blocking ads and trackers not at least partially alleviate the issue? Works well for me and, in combination with a reader view, is a significantly better experience than AMP. I'd argue that those "hackers" you very much hate are the exact ones fighting against corporate bloat on the web.
      - fishywang 6y ago
        "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.
        pps 6y ago
        I'm using Opera on Android, it has ad-blocker built-in. I think Vivaldi has it too.
        fishywang 6y ago
        I know those browsers exist, but how much percentage of mobile web browser traffic are coming from browsers with the ability to block ads?
        Shared404 6y ago
        So because Google's browser is hostile to making the Web useful except for the stuff under Google's control, we should cede control to Google?
        alsetmusic 6y ago
        > "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone. I'm blocking a good percentage of ads in Safari on my iPhone via third-party apps Hush[0] and Magic Lasso[1]. I typically read articles in Reader mode. Because of this, I can't give a great accounting of how many ads actually get through. Certainly, the number is small enough that I don't think about it. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id1260462853 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id12...
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  This is true. AMP is a punch in the gut for someone who advocates for the open web. It says: the roadmap you implemented wasn't right for users. It let publishers abuse the user experience. We are taking a step backward, hiding many things that are too powerful, and making it more restrictive. I completely understand why open web advocates would not greet AMP with a warm welcome. That doesn't mean it wasn't necessary to fix the problems. The problems were and are real.
  - meowfly 6y ago
    I'm still confused what problem AMP was fixing. Google could just make page speed more important in their rankings. They probably don't because page speed isn't as important as content quality in regards to what people are looking for in search. I still struggle to see how AMP has anything to do with improving the search experience and everything to do with Google abusing their market dominance.
    - random5634 6y ago
      Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach. So a ton of the stuff that HN folks demand (being able to do dynamic third party javacript ads and tracker loads, DOM modification after render - gone - you just are totally blocked. If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for. For example - AMP websites really do not reflow that often (or at all). I've never I don't think had something move when I was going to click it even early in page load. I've found a lot of complaints about AMP are developed / hacker focused complaints. If you switch your mindset to users, including non-tech types, the value becomes more obvious.
      - meowfly 6y ago
        That doesn't address my point: Couldn't Google just have increased the rank of pages with minimal Javascript and faster load times? I think you might be strawmanning why some HN folks don't like AMP. To me, at least, it looks like someone abusing their position as the dominant search engine. AMP lightning icons didn't get attached to pages with just one tracker and fast renders. They were attached to pages served by Google that only supported Google tracking.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Reddit's AMP pages have lots of design bloat and much less information than the non-AMP pages. That's not uncommon.
  - random5634 6y ago
    I mostly consumed news stories via google news - so my exposure was relatively narrow
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
acdha 6y ago
This is a valid point but ask whether Google couldn’t have had the same effect by telling everyone that page speed / bloat was a strong ranking factor. AMP forced a large amount of unreliable, slow JavaScript into the critical path so the benefits could have gone even further.
- ip26 6y ago
  They had already done that, perhaps for years. I don't know why it didn't work - perhaps there was a slowness oligopoly, where everyone was slow and no one was strongly incentivized to speed up.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    If that were the case, there wouldn't have been incentives for them to implement AMP
  - acdha 6y ago
    They had it as a minor signal. They could have made it stronger. Posit, for example, that they’d said the carousel was only for sites which rendered in one second on mobile - do you think AMP would really have done more than that?
    - esteth 6y ago
      I think so, because the spec prevents "death by a thousand cuts" and makes it crystal clear what's allowed and what's not. If your marketing department want one more tracking script and your execs want one more pop up banner etc and each change is bad but not egregiously so, then your average "web guy" at most non-big-tech companies will just do what they're asked to. With AMP they get to say "it's not possible"
      - mercer 6y ago
        If Google penalized slow sites, they'd get to say that. I agree that none of this explains the need for AMP.
marricks 6y ago
Google could just penalize websites for being JS heavy or loading slow but instead they built a walled garden they have control over. I get some happiness about it but hopefully we can have nice things without such massive sacrifices.
underwater 6y ago
Google have now said they'll allow any web page in the carousel if it's fast. Which means companies have the same incentives to invest in performance, with the added benefit that the faster experience is on their main web site, not the AMP sidecar. From a pure performance perspective AMP had one secret weapon: Google could safetly prerender content before the user clicked on it. This was offset by the fact that AMP made lots of other page speed optimisations impossible.
tjoff 6y ago
If that was their goal they could just have banned javascript. Much easier and faster. Would also improve the web dramatically.
- dumpsterdiver 6y ago
  Shameless plug for my Chrome Javascript toggle extension, JS Toggle. No unnecessary permissions required, very small footprint, and easy to audit (5.48KiB). Feature set is complete (it does one thing). https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamolmolljikdopibpabimjfellc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...
wmf 6y ago
The slippery slope of bloat is back. "We're currently at a score of 87 so surely a few more ad dollars are worth losing a few points." (one year passes) "Adding just one more chumbox will only drop us from 70 to 66 so we really can't turn it down."
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  I wish they added not just page speed but also "how many obnoxious popups does the site show" as a strong scoring factor.
  - majani 6y ago
    popups have their positive uses. Security on banking websites, anti-cheating on web games, and social logins are a few good reasons I can think of to have popups on a website.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      How does security and anti-cheating require (or is helped by) pop-ups? Social logins are user-initiated. That's fine. What's not fine is that as soon as you visit the site, a giant in-frame "GIVE US YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS" newsletter popup shows up, covering the content.
paxys 6y ago
Sites didn't get fast "against all odds" but rather due to a very clear incentive from Google – adopt AMP and you will be ranked higher. Instead of going that route, Google could have said on day 1 that they would just rank based on the site's experience score (as they are doing now), and the end result would be the exact same.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
AMP sites still load slower than with surgical application of NoScript because of all the JS bloat and superfluous image assets they still manage to deliver. There is a better way that doesn't involve AMP.
- wetpaws 6y ago
  As a user I am not interested in disabling scripts or digging through the dozens of umatririx rules. As a user I just expect things to be fast and working out of the box.
manigandham 6y ago
You know what makes most sites slow? Ads and tracking. You know what the biggest ads and tracking provider is on the internet? Google DFP and Google Analytics. AMP is a solution to a problem of their own making, a clever solution that gives them even more control over search results and data collection (since it never leaves Google domains) while pressuring publishers to spend limited dev resources on a limited subset of viewers while making no impact on the existing website and apps they also run. There's nothing good about AMP beyond technical experimentation. If incentives are a problem, then fix the incentives.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  I don't agree with this, ads are just a part of the problem. Bloat on the web is insane. Open any site using WordPress with a popular off the shelf theme, they weigh in many mb of CSS and js just to show a text article before you count in any ads. Incidentally these sites are the ones who get to benefit most from amp.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Most of that doesn't affect the site UX. Visit any "static" site that are tremendously popular today and you'll see tons of JS files. It's ads/tracking with their complex network payloads and rendering that create the slowdown.
ec109685 6y ago
In terms of full web sites, AMP isn’t that helpful. However, it is impossible to beat AMP’s speed when doing something like loading an article from a Google search result. The AMP spec makes it possible for a search engine to preload an article safely, and as a result, the article can be shown instantly when the user clicks on it.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yeah, it is: just make your website load faster than AMP can hydrate a news page.
fogihujy 6y ago
With luck, this will move emphasis to fast web sites, rather than web sites using a specific technology stack controlled by Alphabet. Using the AMP libraries has never been the issue. Google hijacking the URL's has.
h0nd 6y ago
The only thing I noticed when I used AMP instead of the regular site, is that the comments are missing. Never saw an advantage of this, as 'slow websites' is not an issue in my country.
watwut 6y ago
Who would not like to see white amp page with three old comments when he already configured dark theme on real page and real page has also 20 new comments on it.

by bla3 6y ago

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).
  - m8s 6y ago
    Which users? What a sweeping generalization. Your disdain for some mythical group of people is very odd. Besides, does blocking ads and trackers not at least partially alleviate the issue? Works well for me and, in combination with a reader view, is a significantly better experience than AMP. I'd argue that those "hackers" you very much hate are the exact ones fighting against corporate bloat on the web.
    - fishywang 6y ago
      "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.
      - pps 6y ago
        I'm using Opera on Android, it has ad-blocker built-in. I think Vivaldi has it too.
        fishywang 6y ago
        I know those browsers exist, but how much percentage of mobile web browser traffic are coming from browsers with the ability to block ads?
        Shared404 6y ago
        So because Google's browser is hostile to making the Web useful except for the stuff under Google's control, we should cede control to Google?
      - alsetmusic 6y ago
        > "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone. I'm blocking a good percentage of ads in Safari on my iPhone via third-party apps Hush[0] and Magic Lasso[1]. I typically read articles in Reader mode. Because of this, I can't give a great accounting of how many ads actually get through. Certainly, the number is small enough that I don't think about it. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id1260462853 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id12...
enos_feedler 6y ago
This is true. AMP is a punch in the gut for someone who advocates for the open web. It says: the roadmap you implemented wasn't right for users. It let publishers abuse the user experience. We are taking a step backward, hiding many things that are too powerful, and making it more restrictive. I completely understand why open web advocates would not greet AMP with a warm welcome. That doesn't mean it wasn't necessary to fix the problems. The problems were and are real.
- meowfly 6y ago
  I'm still confused what problem AMP was fixing. Google could just make page speed more important in their rankings. They probably don't because page speed isn't as important as content quality in regards to what people are looking for in search. I still struggle to see how AMP has anything to do with improving the search experience and everything to do with Google abusing their market dominance.
  - random5634 6y ago
    Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach. So a ton of the stuff that HN folks demand (being able to do dynamic third party javacript ads and tracker loads, DOM modification after render - gone - you just are totally blocked. If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for. For example - AMP websites really do not reflow that often (or at all). I've never I don't think had something move when I was going to click it even early in page load. I've found a lot of complaints about AMP are developed / hacker focused complaints. If you switch your mindset to users, including non-tech types, the value becomes more obvious.
    - meowfly 6y ago
      That doesn't address my point: Couldn't Google just have increased the rank of pages with minimal Javascript and faster load times? I think you might be strawmanning why some HN folks don't like AMP. To me, at least, it looks like someone abusing their position as the dominant search engine. AMP lightning icons didn't get attached to pages with just one tracker and fast renders. They were attached to pages served by Google that only supported Google tracking.
Mindwipe 6y ago
Reddit's AMP pages have lots of design bloat and much less information than the non-AMP pages. That's not uncommon.
- random5634 6y ago
  I mostly consumed news stories via google news - so my exposure was relatively narrow

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

acdha 6y ago

This is a valid point but ask whether Google couldn’t have had the same effect by telling everyone that page speed / bloat was a strong ranking factor. AMP forced a large amount of unreliable, slow JavaScript into the critical path so the benefits could have gone even further.

ip26 6y ago
They had already done that, perhaps for years. I don't know why it didn't work - perhaps there was a slowness oligopoly, where everyone was slow and no one was strongly incentivized to speed up.
- Angostura 6y ago
  If that were the case, there wouldn't have been incentives for them to implement AMP
- acdha 6y ago
  They had it as a minor signal. They could have made it stronger. Posit, for example, that they’d said the carousel was only for sites which rendered in one second on mobile - do you think AMP would really have done more than that?
  - esteth 6y ago
    I think so, because the spec prevents "death by a thousand cuts" and makes it crystal clear what's allowed and what's not. If your marketing department want one more tracking script and your execs want one more pop up banner etc and each change is bad but not egregiously so, then your average "web guy" at most non-big-tech companies will just do what they're asked to. With AMP they get to say "it's not possible"
    - mercer 6y ago
      If Google penalized slow sites, they'd get to say that. I agree that none of this explains the need for AMP.

marricks 6y ago

Google could just penalize websites for being JS heavy or loading slow but instead they built a walled garden they have control over. I get some happiness about it but hopefully we can have nice things without such massive sacrifices.

underwater 6y ago

Google have now said they'll allow any web page in the carousel if it's fast. Which means companies have the same incentives to invest in performance, with the added benefit that the faster experience is on their main web site, not the AMP sidecar. From a pure performance perspective AMP had one secret weapon: Google could safetly prerender content before the user clicked on it. This was offset by the fact that AMP made lots of other page speed optimisations impossible.

tjoff 6y ago

If that was their goal they could just have banned javascript. Much easier and faster. Would also improve the web dramatically.

dumpsterdiver 6y ago
Shameless plug for my Chrome Javascript toggle extension, JS Toggle. No unnecessary permissions required, very small footprint, and easy to audit (5.48KiB). Feature set is complete (it does one thing). https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamolmolljikdopibpabimjfellc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...

wmf 6y ago

The slippery slope of bloat is back. "We're currently at a score of 87 so surely a few more ad dollars are worth losing a few points." (one year passes) "Adding just one more chumbox will only drop us from 70 to 66 so we really can't turn it down."

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
I wish they added not just page speed but also "how many obnoxious popups does the site show" as a strong scoring factor.
- majani 6y ago
  popups have their positive uses. Security on banking websites, anti-cheating on web games, and social logins are a few good reasons I can think of to have popups on a website.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    How does security and anti-cheating require (or is helped by) pop-ups? Social logins are user-initiated. That's fine. What's not fine is that as soon as you visit the site, a giant in-frame "GIVE US YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS" newsletter popup shows up, covering the content.

paxys 6y ago

Sites didn't get fast "against all odds" but rather due to a very clear incentive from Google – adopt AMP and you will be ranked higher. Instead of going that route, Google could have said on day 1 that they would just rank based on the site's experience score (as they are doing now), and the end result would be the exact same.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

AMP sites still load slower than with surgical application of NoScript because of all the JS bloat and superfluous image assets they still manage to deliver. There is a better way that doesn't involve AMP.

wetpaws 6y ago
As a user I am not interested in disabling scripts or digging through the dozens of umatririx rules. As a user I just expect things to be fast and working out of the box.

manigandham 6y ago

You know what makes most sites slow? Ads and tracking. You know what the biggest ads and tracking provider is on the internet? Google DFP and Google Analytics. AMP is a solution to a problem of their own making, a clever solution that gives them even more control over search results and data collection (since it never leaves Google domains) while pressuring publishers to spend limited dev resources on a limited subset of viewers while making no impact on the existing website and apps they also run. There's nothing good about AMP beyond technical experimentation. If incentives are a problem, then fix the incentives.

kyriakos 6y ago
I don't agree with this, ads are just a part of the problem. Bloat on the web is insane. Open any site using WordPress with a popular off the shelf theme, they weigh in many mb of CSS and js just to show a text article before you count in any ads. Incidentally these sites are the ones who get to benefit most from amp.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Most of that doesn't affect the site UX. Visit any "static" site that are tremendously popular today and you'll see tons of JS files. It's ads/tracking with their complex network payloads and rendering that create the slowdown.

ec109685 6y ago

In terms of full web sites, AMP isn’t that helpful. However, it is impossible to beat AMP’s speed when doing something like loading an article from a Google search result. The AMP spec makes it possible for a search engine to preload an article safely, and as a result, the article can be shown instantly when the user clicks on it.

saagarjha 6y ago
Yeah, it is: just make your website load faster than AMP can hydrate a news page.

fogihujy 6y ago

With luck, this will move emphasis to fast web sites, rather than web sites using a specific technology stack controlled by Alphabet. Using the AMP libraries has never been the issue. Google hijacking the URL's has.

h0nd 6y ago

The only thing I noticed when I used AMP instead of the regular site, is that the comments are missing. Never saw an advantage of this, as 'slow websites' is not an issue in my country.

watwut 6y ago

Who would not like to see white amp page with three old comments when he already configured dark theme on real page and real page has also 20 new comments on it.