11 ms·

The End of AMP

352 points by rmason 6y ago

MikEnjoysIT 6y ago
Better late than never.
Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
“Avoid unnecessary JavaScript, plugins and bloat, and make your site easy-to-use.” If only web developers would follow this advice...
- spicybright 6y ago
  If there's ever free CPU cycles, you bet devs will squander it.
- JeanMarcS 6y ago
  Exactly. If website haven’t been so bloated in the first place, no one would have believed the AMP propaganda
- huskyr 6y ago
  I've seen it happen more than once that web devs create a website that's very performant, only to be maimed and slowed down to a crawl by the marketing department's trackers and ads...
- rchaud 6y ago
  Hilarious advice considering Google's own non-adherence to it. Opening Gmail today is slower than when I was opening it on IE6 in 2004.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  This is the thing that gets me. The criticisms of AMP regarding how evil Google has been with it are all valid. But to the average user that doesn't care (Remember, HN users are anything but average!), AMP is an absolute godsend. Normally when I view a news article on mobile, it's plagued with the scroll jumping around as things load, obnoxious controls, frequent freezing, and just overall a terrible experience. AMP for the most part fixed all that. Pages load in only a second or two, and once they've loaded, they're smooth to scroll though and STAY smooth. I don't do web development (Professionally anyways, I've got a couple small <3K LOC pet projects), so I don't understand why the current world is such total garbage. I just went to a few news sites, and the front pages sent me anywhere from 3.5 to 6 MB of JavaScript, and that's even with my ad blocker disabled. And then some of them started sending me even more once I started scrolling. There's no reason for all this bloat. It does not take 3.5 MB of JavaScript to load content asynchronously and create some menus. And that's minified JavaScript. So yeah...AMP is here to stay, and the users are grateful.
stephenr 6y ago
Sounds like just the next calculated step. 1. Introduce $badThing with claims about page load performance. 2. tell sites they need to use $badThing to get into the “carousel” 3. Scale back the requirement of #2 just soon enough that you can argue against any claims of market manipulation via your monopoly. 4. (Continue to) Profit, because 80% of the sites that implemented it aren’t going to just rip it out now that it’s there.
- bsaul 6y ago
  i disagree with 4. Sites need maintenance and evolution. i don't know a single dev that won't eagerly drop something as impacting as amp as soon as it's an option.
  - spicybright 6y ago
    Not every site has an active dev, devs are hella expensive. Vast majority of owners will have a maintenance guy to call up if something stops working to patch it, until it gets too dysfunctional and needs a re-write.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    However most of the time it's not the devs making the decision on what needs to be done for a site.
  - stephenr 6y ago
    (a) that assumes the dev wants to. Plenty of developers still see Google as the all-knowing all-loving mother titty that can do no wrong. Even for those who acknowledge Google may do shitty things, but are more interested in pulling their dick or what have you, rather than doing the work to make a great $thing, AMP gives them an easy out. No interpretation required, no need to worry about timings or what a "core web vital" is. Just follow this bouncing ball. Monkey see, monkey do. (b) that assumes the dev is allowed to. Plenty of middle and upper management will always defer to "the industry" over any amount developer insight - particularly when the pitch is essentially "lets remove this thing so we can do some more work ourselves to achieve the same result". (c) even if the dev wants to, and management OK it - maintenance is literally that: maintaining the status quo. Evolution, particularly on the scale of large sites, is a long term thing. Big news sites are some of the worst offenders for junking up a page. Google could have "fixed" that by using the metrics discussed in the article to determine "carousel" results, from the start. But then they'd just have made a bunch of websites load faster, and wouldn't have added yet another tentacle around the web.
dmitriid 6y ago
Make no mistake: Google could have page metrics used in search ranking years ago. The reasons they introduce these now isn't because of the kindness of hearts or because they changed their minds. Most likely (one, or some, or any of these reasons): - there's a potential court battle regarding AMP, and Google wants to get ahead - publishers are leaving the platform - there are new advertising opportunities that bring as much money to Google, or more, than AMP (or are better than potentially losing money on courts and to publishers leaving)
- piva00 6y ago
  Google has done that in the past, I worked through the whole PageSpeed introduction, measurements, dumb decisions made to products just for SEO sake, etc. They had this before, they could have just expanded it, they preferred to introduce AMP instead. Worse, introduced AMP with the whole corporate backing of it, they knew what they were doing.
lexicality 6y ago
Another entry for the Google Graveyard. Kind of depressing when you think of all the money and engineering hours that went into trying to make websites work with AMP that could have been spent on just making their existing code less shitty...
- lexicality 6y ago
  Then again, probably most of them wouldn't have bothered anyway given what the rest of the mobile web landscape looks like.
telaelit 6y ago
We should all throw a massive party to celebrate the death of AMP
- slver 6y ago
  It's not dead yet.
uncomputation 6y ago
Thank god and I am honestly surprised it took this long. If it was ever purely about page speed (which we all know it wasn’t but play along) then given the choice between “analyzing a one-time metric per page” and “inventing a new parallel HTML, CSS, and JS standard and still analyzing pages for usage of this standard,” I think it seems pretty obvious the former is better in about every way. Site-specific functions like login/auth still work, there’s only one URL for a given page (not to mention the countless amp.google.com/blah links scattered about forever now), less caching required on Google’s part, and you put the power of the web to express yourself back in the hands of the sitemasters. I don’t know what possessed Google to think they knew page design better than publishers but AMP pages are seriously ugly. Good riddance!
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  The article title is miss leading, it’s someone arguing that it should be shelved So long as google strongly influences page views it lives
gsnedders 6y ago
> AMP also came with the unfortunate requirement that publishers let traffic sources such as Google cache their content and serve it from their domain, such as google.com. At least with Chrome, one related performance advantage will remain, given AMP pages will remain preloaded from Google results pages, whereas non-AMP pages won't be. Why is this related? On mobile, Google preloads AMP pages in the carousel that are in the Google cache, which will obviously give them a page-load time advantage. Why not do that for more sites? Avoiding third-parties (i.e., third-party v. the Google results page) from being able to detect when they appear in search results and getting data (like IP) from the user regardless of whether or not they click on the result. Is this insurmountable? Can you outperform it? Sure, but it's inevitably going to be harder as a result.
- jefftk 6y ago
  This has changed too: Signed exchanges (SXG) allow Google Search to prefetch your content while preserving the user’s privacy. In practice, this means that both AMP and non-AMP results shown on Google Search may prefetch a few key resources (such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, or fonts) in a privacy-preserving manner, if the associated website supports SXG. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experience/signed-exchange https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experienc... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
instagraham 6y ago
Whenver i am trying to share a news article with a friend, and Google throws up the AMP page at me, I take the time to select the original article link and share that. Websites deserve their own traffic, not Google's.
- chalst 6y ago
  Not having to do this is a good reason to use another search engine than Google's as your default.
- AgentME 6y ago
  Is that very different from "Whenever I find a site hosted through CloudFlare, I look up the origin server's IP address and link to that. Webservers deserve traffic, not CDNs."?
  - roofwellhams 6y ago
    If Google decided to remove your link, then it's gone. If cloudflare removes your link, you can easily just change provider.
  - ericyan 6y ago
    Unlike a normal CDN, AMP does not serve the same content as the origin. You need to make a special, lite edition of the original web page which does not work on Safari or Firefox, and may not necessarily make your site faster. [1] You cannot switch AMP cache to another vendor if you want Google rank your AMP site higher. [2] You also need a speical TLS certificate with the CanSignHttpExchanges extension that can only be get from DigiCert (for a price)[3] and not from Let's Encrypt [4]. [1] https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/41683427 https://stackoverflow.com/a/41683427 [3] https://web.dev/how-to-set-up-signed-http-exchanges/#step-1 https://web.dev/how-to-set-up-signed-http-exchanges/#step-1 [4] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges-extension/90658 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges-ext...
    - 6y ago
tmikaeld 6y ago
Why does this seem to "confirm" that AMP is dead? The article just "hopes" it will die, it doesn't point to any specific source that it will. Quite the opposite, it says "Google will continue to support AMP" on the Google Page Experience update.
- FriedrichN 6y ago
  The key part of the article is this: > I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. If there's no reason to use AMP other than to waste money, it's very likely it will be used less and less. And then it's just a matter of time before Google pulls the plug.
  - tmikaeld 6y ago
    While that's certainly a good step on the way, I'll be holding my breath until it's official, It's the most annoyingly long-lived piece of shit I've ever had the displeasure to work with.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    From Google's perspective that is an excellent reason to continue. What I don't understand is why all these parties instantly sign up to any abomination Google decides to foist on us without thinking through the consequences and realizing that they just handed Google even more control than they already had.
    - jeltz 6y ago
      Because if they do no do it they fear some of their competitors will. And that is how Google makes everyone implemnt AMp despite it being bad for everyone who is not Google.
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      Because google already has enough control to destroy the business of these websites. Not getting into the carousel is a pretty serious dent in the business of many websites (because their competition will, and any website below the carousel is going to get a fraction of the clicks of one in it). If google required a blood sacrifice to get on the first page of results, a huge number of websites would reply "animal or human?"
FriedrichN 6y ago
I am so happy I have been able to avoid AMP my entire career and this ensures that I will probably will never have to bother with it in the future. This 'web inside the web' stuff is so antithetical to what the web is supposed to be, I hope Google will just pull the plug like they do with just about everything else that isn't the search engine or G-mail.
- ExtraE 6y ago
  Or youtube, although that makes a lot of money so probably not anytime soon.
  - justinator 6y ago
    Or ads, 'cause why do they have search at all if not to search you ads?
    - romwell 6y ago
      Or maps, because geo searches are a source of revenue too :)
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > Or youtube, although that makes a lot of money so probably not anytime soon Does it? Alphabet quarterly reports don't list YouTube revenues and expenses separately, and i imagine something like YouTube costs a shit load of money in storage and bandwidth.
    - swiley 6y ago
      I'm sure compute isn't a small amount either. Video encoding is not cheap.
      - sofixa 6y ago
        Yeah, they went as far as designing a custom chip for encoding.
smkriti28 6y ago
Hey, it's Smriti. Your article is a good one. I must say not everybody knows how to write blogs and make them look professional. Being a law student I always look for data points like charts, analysis in articles. Yours seems to give justice to the topic. My personal style includes a lot of graphs, numbers and informative videos. I write on www.successmantra.com for law related exams.
smkriti28 6y ago
Hey, it's Smriti. Your article is a good one. I must say not everybody knows how to write blogs and make them look professional. Being a law student I always look for data points like charts, analysis in articles. Yours seems to give justice to the topic. My personal style includes a lot of graphs, numbers and informative videos. I write on https://www.successmantra.com https://www.successmantra.com for law related exams.
pjmlp 6y ago
A phyrric victory for a Web that is basically ChromeOS. Ever heard of Web Bundles? https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://github.com/WICG/webpackage https://github.com/WICG/webpackage
- ksec 6y ago
  How is Web Bundles different from .mht, which I "think", if I remember correctly is the same as MHTML. And Safari somehow support something else..... This is a genuine question. It is such a simple feature, zipping an HTML file with all of its resources. Why do we need that many standards for it. Is it NIH syndrome or are there technical reasons in doing so?
  - detaro 6y ago
    Zipping an HTML file and the resources is not equivalent, since the browser behavior very much depends on HTTP headers etc, which MHTML doesn't capture. From the existing formats, that leaves pretty much just WARC, but that's also already kind of niche, has a a bunch of interoperability issues in practice, would probably need extending/reinterpreting to fit, and just like MHTML uses base64 for binary files, which is needlessly inefficient for the purpose here. The more important things to specify are the browser behaviors when working with such files and the signature mechanisms, and those specifications you'd also need if you reused a format.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    AFAIK bundles are designed to enable Google's CDN to serve up signed bundles from their servers and masquerade the bundles as coming from your site's domain. That's not something MHT files were designed for. (This actual feature is separate.)
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      It would be nice, though, if a site owner could use an offline private key to sign a web bundle, and then instruct browsers to only load their web app if the signature matches its public key. The key would probably have to be delivered in-band, requiring a TOFU security policy, but that's not so bad. Ideally the browser would also keep track of which version of the app it loaded last time, and give the user the option of fetching a newer version if one is available, to prevent malicious updates.
jacquesm 6y ago
I'm flagging this article because of a very misleading title. This is definitely not the end of AMP.
- chalst 6y ago
  The title is somewhat misleading, but if Google do not come up with a compelling reason to use the widely hated AMP, its future sure doesn't look rosy.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    There hasn't been a compelling reason since day 1, that did not make a difference so far and since this is a way for google to play outsiders against each other it will take more than just a few stragglers to turn the tide. Only a mass coordinated boycott of AMP will do away with it.
franze 6y ago
I created a - very - opinionated Wordpress Theme that out of the box - after following the install instructions - fulfils the Web Core Vitals. this was the failed campaign for it https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/franzseo/fastest-possible-seo-wordpress-theme/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/franzseo/fastest-possib... we created it anyways. now i am looking for alpha testers. my email is in my profile. oh yeah, it is AMP free as AMP is .... a horrible developer hostile, brittle and free internet hostile technology, not even mentioning the QA overhead it burdens on every project.
- franze 6y ago
  For those interested, my own website is based on it https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fullstackoptimization.com%2Fa%2Funderstanding-seo https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
captainmuon 6y ago
> AMP also came with the unfortunate requirement that publishers let traffic sources such as Google cache their content and serve it from their domain, such as google.com. I think this is backwards. Google offers to host your content on their domains, and if you want that it requires you to use certain markup, and only certain ads. If your job is monetizing content, or if you want to raise some abstract "time spend on domain" metric, then I can understand how this can be unpopular. But if your goal is to have your content read by many people, have very fast load times, and spend a bit less on traffic, then it is beneficial.
- Mordisquitos 6y ago
  > But if your goal is to have your content read by many people, have very fast load times, and spend a bit less on traffic, then it is beneficial. But that was not the problem. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Google offering AMP as a content hosting service subject to certain syntax and content limitations. The problem was that, however fast your load times were in practice, all else being equal Google's search engine would penalise your ranking compared to using Google's AMP—all under the pretence of favouring "very fast load times".
svat 6y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 (from 40 days ago)
maxekman 6y ago
My favorite way to avoid AMP is to use DuckDuckGo. :)
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  If that were the solution, amp might not be so bad. But people reuse amp URLs - it's not just a search engine thing.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  My least favorite way to avoid AMP is to use DuckDuckGo. It seems like a pretty good search engine for desktop (research, tech, etc.), but for anything I want while on the road (community stuff, culture, restaurants) it's not good at all. But I suck it up and use DDG on my iPhone anyway, better that than risk losing my temper and throwing my phone into traffic. Every year when WWDC rolls around, I hope that Apple is finally ready to announce WebExtensions for iOS. I'm pretty sure that building an AMP buster would be child's play. Keeping my fingers crossed… again… X,,
numair 6y ago
Please don’t let your excitement take your focus off this part of the story: > The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective. It is also alleged that Google let their own exchange win, even when someone else bid more! Somewhere, in a parallel universe, people are going to jail and paying substantial fines for this behavior. In this universe, however, politicians don’t seem to think there is a moral hazard in the fact that those of us who work in this industry see what happened and think, “if you get big enough, it doesn’t matter if you get caught.”
- dannyw 6y ago
  There are active lawsuits going on by something like 49 out of 50 states. That's how damning evidence like this -- as well as Facebook offering to share unencrypted WhatsApp messages with Google (through the "backup to Drive" feature) -- came out to light. Unfortunately a lot of HN readers are dismissing this or calling it partisan grandstanding, just because it's Texas that filed it.
  - propogandist 6y ago
    > Facebook offering to share unencrypted WhatsApp messages with Google where can I read more on why they allowed this?
    - burkaman 6y ago
      I haven't found any statements about it from either company, but here's a decent article: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whatsapp-google-drive-backups-plaintext,37718.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whatsapp-google-drive-back...
      - hedora 6y ago
        According to that article, they also snoop on the content of any files stored in Drive. To think, just a decade ago, this article seemed paranoid, to the point where even the author seemed to think it was an oversight in the Terms of Service: https://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/will-google-drive-snoop-inside-your-data-google-needs-to-be-clearer/ https://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/will-google-drive-snoop... Interestingly, they give (gave?) themselves redistribution and performance rights for Drive contents at the same time. How long until they start openly using those rights, I wonder?
whalabi 6y ago
2 years ago, I openly wondered why Google gives AMP preferential treatment when they already have the ability to rank pages by speed. AMP is about control, not speed: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed
neophyt3 6y ago
what about AMP stories
saos 6y ago
What about the toxicity that’s AMP for email?
- tyingq 6y ago
  Google doesn't seem to have the same kind of leverage to push that idea around. Or at least, hasn't chosen to use it.
GuB-42 6y ago
It is not the end of AMP. In fact, I suspect it will only affect the small minority of sites that work better without AMP, the ones everyone who dislike AMP talk about. But for most mainstream news sites, I find AMP better than the typically bloated non-AMP version. And I bet Google will have the same opinion when ranking sites. This is excellent news, but unfortunately, I don't think it will change the situation much. I wish it would, but most websites owners simply don't care about performance.
inshadows 6y ago
> I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. So I know nothing about AMP, but I've skimmed through the Google's documentation of signed exchanges, and it seemed like a good thing. I assume that it is the foundation of AMP. Isn't the point of signed exchanges that you, the publisher, don't have to invest in beefy servers and CDNs, and instead rely on third parties (for fee or free) to store the (signed) content? Of course AMP being a Google service the monopoly thing is hard to ignore. > AMP created all kinds of problems, from analytics to ad serving to logins. Oh no, it hinders competition with Google for surveillance and ad spam!
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  It's a pity you're being downvoted (perhaps because of the sarcastic tone of your final sentence), as I think you are right about Signed Exchanges. The technology could have some useful non-evil applications. I wrote another comment in this discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024415
jsnell 6y ago
Previous discussion (208 comments). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498
donohoe 6y ago
I’m rebuilding a leaderboard for news articles, switching from WebPageTest to Lighthouse. The next step is to highlight when your need page hits the right benchmarks to qualify for “Top Stories” My worry is that most sites won’t qualify and AMP continues https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz
pdenton 6y ago
The article says "The largest and most talked-about item in the update is Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile." Can anyone please explain what "passing core web vitals" means? It links to very lengthy articles full of SEO jargon that I don't understand.
- sergiosgc 6y ago
  Use the Google Search Console to check for Core Web Vitals problems. Look for the "Experience" section on the left menu.
  - pdenton 6y ago
    Unfortunately, that requires a Google account, which requires a valid phone number. Is this different from PageSpeed Insights? If not, why doesn't PageSpeed Insights suffice? All I'm doing is creating websites that are as accessible and easy to use as possible. I shouldn't need to sign up and give my data to Google to do that. HTML5 (with CSS and JS) and HTTP is all I should have to deal with, registering for search engines seems backwards to me.
tyingq 6y ago
I was hoping I'd start seeing notable amounts of non-AMP stories in the carousel. Just tested it with some news type query strings, and it's not the case yet.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bjt2n3904 6y ago
The most frustrating issue with web development is fads. Every month there's a new must have technology that spreads with the most powerful marketing technique: FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt. "Did you hear about AMP? Yeah we switched to it last week. I heard Google would start weighting pages that didn't use it down. Wait, you haven't made the switch yet? Well... I don't know, we'll see what happens..." If I smell FUD as a marketing technique, I'm out. The odds that you're trying to sell me something I don't need are astronomical -- and in four years, management will be driving me to the next big fad under FOMO.
tootie 6y ago
Is there a process for off boarding AMP? We serve them now but want to stop. Can we just shut it off or will Google punish us?
- tyingq 6y ago
  "Who is gonna go first" seems to be an issue. I'm unable to produce a query that sticks any non-AMP result into the front of the carousel. So, everyone seems to be waiting for some notable publication to go first.
IshKebab 6y ago
> This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. Yeah I won't hold my breath.
defaultname 6y ago
Having AMP controlled and intermediated by Google was always a bad thing. It tainted what ultimately was a good effort, which is taking the enormous scope of web technologies we have now and winnowing them back down again for optimized publishing purposes. And this article does what is often done in the AMP discussion and (disingenuously) demonstrates that you can make a non-AMP page that's smaller/faster than an AMP page. No one ever contested that. No one ever doubted it. But AMP isn't the alternative to your minimalist page, it's the alternative to the grotesquely overloaded media site where over time every single web technology gets smashed into a monstrous, massive pig of a page. Comparing the AMP pages of a news source and what they serve in their "full" web experience and it's absolute night and day. I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.
- tomComb 6y ago
  AMP was about keeping news content on the web competitive with Facebook instant articles. When Google was forced to cut a deal with News Corp last month (the Australian debacle) that would bring News content from the open web into their News app, AMP became much less important to them anyway. All in all, yes, another loss for the open web, but I think the picture is more complicated then the "AMP is evil" meme.
- intergalplan 6y ago
  My problems with AMP are: 1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web, 2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do, 3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender) Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.
- bashinator 6y ago
  > I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains. There are some options for activating reader view even before loading a web site[0]. I imagine it would be a pretty light lift from there, to create an extension that keeps a domain list which automatically prepends the reader view URL prefix. The magic prefix is about:reader?url= [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-enable-reader-view-in-mozilla-firefox/ https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...
john_alan 6y ago
I detest AMP. Every time I fall into it’s clutches I can’t help but feel like I’ve wandered into a trap.
acvny 6y ago
I have always detested AMP. But there was no other way around - if you wanted to appear in google results on top you had to use it.
iou 6y ago
I'm here for this! You have my axe
halotrope 6y ago
It would be such a blessing. Not even going into the obvious ethical and political implications of an AMP-powered web, it simply has broken UX on mobile. On iPhone it is possible to horizontally scroll the pages and then they are stuck in an unreadable state until reload. Seeing only "google.com" in the header is just the icing on the cake. Instead of one click to go to the source page you need to open a menu to go there. It makes me furious every time. IMHO Google really jumped the shark with AMP. Claiming it is for the users good and speed of the web is just hypocrisy. We would not need "accelerated" mobile pages if it was not for the garbage 10mb of trackers that are on every page because it helps them monetize with Google.
ilikenwf 6y ago
As an aside, blocking AMP with uBlock origin and using this userscript removes it entirely, including the annoying delay: https://gist.github.com/ilikenwf/0c732fc3e657f29a0b6f2bad4c473ca5 https://gist.github.com/ilikenwf/0c732fc3e657f29a0b6f2bad4c4...
dqpb 6y ago
Ironically, Google News was totally ruined by AMP.

352 points by rmason 6y ago

Better late than never.

“Avoid unnecessary JavaScript, plugins and bloat, and make your site easy-to-use.” If only web developers would follow this advice...

spicybright 6y ago
If there's ever free CPU cycles, you bet devs will squander it.
JeanMarcS 6y ago
Exactly. If website haven’t been so bloated in the first place, no one would have believed the AMP propaganda
huskyr 6y ago
I've seen it happen more than once that web devs create a website that's very performant, only to be maimed and slowed down to a crawl by the marketing department's trackers and ads...
rchaud 6y ago
Hilarious advice considering Google's own non-adherence to it. Opening Gmail today is slower than when I was opening it on IE6 in 2004.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
This is the thing that gets me. The criticisms of AMP regarding how evil Google has been with it are all valid. But to the average user that doesn't care (Remember, HN users are anything but average!), AMP is an absolute godsend. Normally when I view a news article on mobile, it's plagued with the scroll jumping around as things load, obnoxious controls, frequent freezing, and just overall a terrible experience. AMP for the most part fixed all that. Pages load in only a second or two, and once they've loaded, they're smooth to scroll though and STAY smooth. I don't do web development (Professionally anyways, I've got a couple small <3K LOC pet projects), so I don't understand why the current world is such total garbage. I just went to a few news sites, and the front pages sent me anywhere from 3.5 to 6 MB of JavaScript, and that's even with my ad blocker disabled. And then some of them started sending me even more once I started scrolling. There's no reason for all this bloat. It does not take 3.5 MB of JavaScript to load content asynchronously and create some menus. And that's minified JavaScript. So yeah...AMP is here to stay, and the users are grateful.

stephenr 6y ago

Sounds like just the next calculated step. 1. Introduce $badThing with claims about page load performance. 2. tell sites they need to use $badThing to get into the “carousel” 3. Scale back the requirement of #2 just soon enough that you can argue against any claims of market manipulation via your monopoly. 4. (Continue to) Profit, because 80% of the sites that implemented it aren’t going to just rip it out now that it’s there.

bsaul 6y ago
i disagree with 4. Sites need maintenance and evolution. i don't know a single dev that won't eagerly drop something as impacting as amp as soon as it's an option.
- spicybright 6y ago
  Not every site has an active dev, devs are hella expensive. Vast majority of owners will have a maintenance guy to call up if something stops working to patch it, until it gets too dysfunctional and needs a re-write.
- aequitas 6y ago
  However most of the time it's not the devs making the decision on what needs to be done for a site.
- stephenr 6y ago
  (a) that assumes the dev wants to. Plenty of developers still see Google as the all-knowing all-loving mother titty that can do no wrong. Even for those who acknowledge Google may do shitty things, but are more interested in pulling their dick or what have you, rather than doing the work to make a great $thing, AMP gives them an easy out. No interpretation required, no need to worry about timings or what a "core web vital" is. Just follow this bouncing ball. Monkey see, monkey do. (b) that assumes the dev is allowed to. Plenty of middle and upper management will always defer to "the industry" over any amount developer insight - particularly when the pitch is essentially "lets remove this thing so we can do some more work ourselves to achieve the same result". (c) even if the dev wants to, and management OK it - maintenance is literally that: maintaining the status quo. Evolution, particularly on the scale of large sites, is a long term thing. Big news sites are some of the worst offenders for junking up a page. Google could have "fixed" that by using the metrics discussed in the article to determine "carousel" results, from the start. But then they'd just have made a bunch of websites load faster, and wouldn't have added yet another tentacle around the web.

dmitriid 6y ago

Make no mistake: Google could have page metrics used in search ranking years ago. The reasons they introduce these now isn't because of the kindness of hearts or because they changed their minds. Most likely (one, or some, or any of these reasons): - there's a potential court battle regarding AMP, and Google wants to get ahead - publishers are leaving the platform - there are new advertising opportunities that bring as much money to Google, or more, than AMP (or are better than potentially losing money on courts and to publishers leaving)

piva00 6y ago
Google has done that in the past, I worked through the whole PageSpeed introduction, measurements, dumb decisions made to products just for SEO sake, etc. They had this before, they could have just expanded it, they preferred to introduce AMP instead. Worse, introduced AMP with the whole corporate backing of it, they knew what they were doing.

lexicality 6y ago

Another entry for the Google Graveyard. Kind of depressing when you think of all the money and engineering hours that went into trying to make websites work with AMP that could have been spent on just making their existing code less shitty...

lexicality 6y ago
Then again, probably most of them wouldn't have bothered anyway given what the rest of the mobile web landscape looks like.

telaelit 6y ago

We should all throw a massive party to celebrate the death of AMP

slver 6y ago
It's not dead yet.

uncomputation 6y ago

Thank god and I am honestly surprised it took this long. If it was ever purely about page speed (which we all know it wasn’t but play along) then given the choice between “analyzing a one-time metric per page” and “inventing a new parallel HTML, CSS, and JS standard and still analyzing pages for usage of this standard,” I think it seems pretty obvious the former is better in about every way. Site-specific functions like login/auth still work, there’s only one URL for a given page (not to mention the countless amp.google.com/blah links scattered about forever now), less caching required on Google’s part, and you put the power of the web to express yourself back in the hands of the sitemasters. I don’t know what possessed Google to think they knew page design better than publishers but AMP pages are seriously ugly. Good riddance!

zaphirplane 6y ago
The article title is miss leading, it’s someone arguing that it should be shelved So long as google strongly influences page views it lives

gsnedders 6y ago

> AMP also came with the unfortunate requirement that publishers let traffic sources such as Google cache their content and serve it from their domain, such as google.com. At least with Chrome, one related performance advantage will remain, given AMP pages will remain preloaded from Google results pages, whereas non-AMP pages won't be. Why is this related? On mobile, Google preloads AMP pages in the carousel that are in the Google cache, which will obviously give them a page-load time advantage. Why not do that for more sites? Avoiding third-parties (i.e., third-party v. the Google results page) from being able to detect when they appear in search results and getting data (like IP) from the user regardless of whether or not they click on the result. Is this insurmountable? Can you outperform it? Sure, but it's inevitably going to be harder as a result.

jefftk 6y ago
This has changed too: Signed exchanges (SXG) allow Google Search to prefetch your content while preserving the user’s privacy. In practice, this means that both AMP and non-AMP results shown on Google Search may prefetch a few key resources (such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, or fonts) in a privacy-preserving manner, if the associated website supports SXG. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experience/signed-exchange https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experienc... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

instagraham 6y ago

Whenver i am trying to share a news article with a friend, and Google throws up the AMP page at me, I take the time to select the original article link and share that. Websites deserve their own traffic, not Google's.

chalst 6y ago
Not having to do this is a good reason to use another search engine than Google's as your default.
AgentME 6y ago
Is that very different from "Whenever I find a site hosted through CloudFlare, I look up the origin server's IP address and link to that. Webservers deserve traffic, not CDNs."?
- roofwellhams 6y ago
  If Google decided to remove your link, then it's gone. If cloudflare removes your link, you can easily just change provider.
- ericyan 6y ago
  Unlike a normal CDN, AMP does not serve the same content as the origin. You need to make a special, lite edition of the original web page which does not work on Safari or Firefox, and may not necessarily make your site faster. [1] You cannot switch AMP cache to another vendor if you want Google rank your AMP site higher. [2] You also need a speical TLS certificate with the CanSignHttpExchanges extension that can only be get from DigiCert (for a price)[3] and not from Let's Encrypt [4]. [1] https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/41683427 https://stackoverflow.com/a/41683427 [3] https://web.dev/how-to-set-up-signed-http-exchanges/#step-1 https://web.dev/how-to-set-up-signed-http-exchanges/#step-1 [4] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges-extension/90658 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges-ext...
  - 6y ago

tmikaeld 6y ago

Why does this seem to "confirm" that AMP is dead? The article just "hopes" it will die, it doesn't point to any specific source that it will. Quite the opposite, it says "Google will continue to support AMP" on the Google Page Experience update.

FriedrichN 6y ago
The key part of the article is this: > I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. If there's no reason to use AMP other than to waste money, it's very likely it will be used less and less. And then it's just a matter of time before Google pulls the plug.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  While that's certainly a good step on the way, I'll be holding my breath until it's official, It's the most annoyingly long-lived piece of shit I've ever had the displeasure to work with.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  From Google's perspective that is an excellent reason to continue. What I don't understand is why all these parties instantly sign up to any abomination Google decides to foist on us without thinking through the consequences and realizing that they just handed Google even more control than they already had.
  - jeltz 6y ago
    Because if they do no do it they fear some of their competitors will. And that is how Google makes everyone implemnt AMp despite it being bad for everyone who is not Google.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Because google already has enough control to destroy the business of these websites. Not getting into the carousel is a pretty serious dent in the business of many websites (because their competition will, and any website below the carousel is going to get a fraction of the clicks of one in it). If google required a blood sacrifice to get on the first page of results, a huge number of websites would reply "animal or human?"

FriedrichN 6y ago

I am so happy I have been able to avoid AMP my entire career and this ensures that I will probably will never have to bother with it in the future. This 'web inside the web' stuff is so antithetical to what the web is supposed to be, I hope Google will just pull the plug like they do with just about everything else that isn't the search engine or G-mail.

ExtraE 6y ago
Or youtube, although that makes a lot of money so probably not anytime soon.
- justinator 6y ago
  Or ads, 'cause why do they have search at all if not to search you ads?
  - romwell 6y ago
    Or maps, because geo searches are a source of revenue too :)
- sofixa 6y ago
  > Or youtube, although that makes a lot of money so probably not anytime soon Does it? Alphabet quarterly reports don't list YouTube revenues and expenses separately, and i imagine something like YouTube costs a shit load of money in storage and bandwidth.
  - swiley 6y ago
    I'm sure compute isn't a small amount either. Video encoding is not cheap.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      Yeah, they went as far as designing a custom chip for encoding.

smkriti28 6y ago

Hey, it's Smriti. Your article is a good one. I must say not everybody knows how to write blogs and make them look professional. Being a law student I always look for data points like charts, analysis in articles. Yours seems to give justice to the topic. My personal style includes a lot of graphs, numbers and informative videos. I write on www.successmantra.com for law related exams.

smkriti28 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

A phyrric victory for a Web that is basically ChromeOS. Ever heard of Web Bundles? https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://github.com/WICG/webpackage https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

ksec 6y ago
How is Web Bundles different from .mht, which I "think", if I remember correctly is the same as MHTML. And Safari somehow support something else..... This is a genuine question. It is such a simple feature, zipping an HTML file with all of its resources. Why do we need that many standards for it. Is it NIH syndrome or are there technical reasons in doing so?
- detaro 6y ago
  Zipping an HTML file and the resources is not equivalent, since the browser behavior very much depends on HTTP headers etc, which MHTML doesn't capture. From the existing formats, that leaves pretty much just WARC, but that's also already kind of niche, has a a bunch of interoperability issues in practice, would probably need extending/reinterpreting to fit, and just like MHTML uses base64 for binary files, which is needlessly inefficient for the purpose here. The more important things to specify are the browser behaviors when working with such files and the signature mechanisms, and those specifications you'd also need if you reused a format.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  AFAIK bundles are designed to enable Google's CDN to serve up signed bundles from their servers and masquerade the bundles as coming from your site's domain. That's not something MHT files were designed for. (This actual feature is separate.)
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    It would be nice, though, if a site owner could use an offline private key to sign a web bundle, and then instruct browsers to only load their web app if the signature matches its public key. The key would probably have to be delivered in-band, requiring a TOFU security policy, but that's not so bad. Ideally the browser would also keep track of which version of the app it loaded last time, and give the user the option of fetching a newer version if one is available, to prevent malicious updates.

jacquesm 6y ago

I'm flagging this article because of a very misleading title. This is definitely not the end of AMP.

chalst 6y ago
The title is somewhat misleading, but if Google do not come up with a compelling reason to use the widely hated AMP, its future sure doesn't look rosy.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  There hasn't been a compelling reason since day 1, that did not make a difference so far and since this is a way for google to play outsiders against each other it will take more than just a few stragglers to turn the tide. Only a mass coordinated boycott of AMP will do away with it.

franze 6y ago

I created a - very - opinionated Wordpress Theme that out of the box - after following the install instructions - fulfils the Web Core Vitals. this was the failed campaign for it https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/franzseo/fastest-possible-seo-wordpress-theme/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/franzseo/fastest-possib... we created it anyways. now i am looking for alpha testers. my email is in my profile. oh yeah, it is AMP free as AMP is .... a horrible developer hostile, brittle and free internet hostile technology, not even mentioning the QA overhead it burdens on every project.

franze 6y ago
For those interested, my own website is based on it https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fullstackoptimization.com%2Fa%2Funderstanding-seo https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

captainmuon 6y ago

> AMP also came with the unfortunate requirement that publishers let traffic sources such as Google cache their content and serve it from their domain, such as google.com. I think this is backwards. Google offers to host your content on their domains, and if you want that it requires you to use certain markup, and only certain ads. If your job is monetizing content, or if you want to raise some abstract "time spend on domain" metric, then I can understand how this can be unpopular. But if your goal is to have your content read by many people, have very fast load times, and spend a bit less on traffic, then it is beneficial.

Mordisquitos 6y ago
> But if your goal is to have your content read by many people, have very fast load times, and spend a bit less on traffic, then it is beneficial. But that was not the problem. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Google offering AMP as a content hosting service subject to certain syntax and content limitations. The problem was that, however fast your load times were in practice, all else being equal Google's search engine would penalise your ranking compared to using Google's AMP—all under the pretence of favouring "very fast load times".

svat 6y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 (from 40 days ago)

maxekman 6y ago

My favorite way to avoid AMP is to use DuckDuckGo. :)

oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
If that were the solution, amp might not be so bad. But people reuse amp URLs - it's not just a search engine thing.
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
My least favorite way to avoid AMP is to use DuckDuckGo. It seems like a pretty good search engine for desktop (research, tech, etc.), but for anything I want while on the road (community stuff, culture, restaurants) it's not good at all. But I suck it up and use DDG on my iPhone anyway, better that than risk losing my temper and throwing my phone into traffic. Every year when WWDC rolls around, I hope that Apple is finally ready to announce WebExtensions for iOS. I'm pretty sure that building an AMP buster would be child's play. Keeping my fingers crossed… again… X,,

numair 6y ago

Please don’t let your excitement take your focus off this part of the story: > The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective. It is also alleged that Google let their own exchange win, even when someone else bid more! Somewhere, in a parallel universe, people are going to jail and paying substantial fines for this behavior. In this universe, however, politicians don’t seem to think there is a moral hazard in the fact that those of us who work in this industry see what happened and think, “if you get big enough, it doesn’t matter if you get caught.”

dannyw 6y ago
There are active lawsuits going on by something like 49 out of 50 states. That's how damning evidence like this -- as well as Facebook offering to share unencrypted WhatsApp messages with Google (through the "backup to Drive" feature) -- came out to light. Unfortunately a lot of HN readers are dismissing this or calling it partisan grandstanding, just because it's Texas that filed it.
- propogandist 6y ago
  > Facebook offering to share unencrypted WhatsApp messages with Google where can I read more on why they allowed this?
  - burkaman 6y ago
    I haven't found any statements about it from either company, but here's a decent article: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whatsapp-google-drive-backups-plaintext,37718.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whatsapp-google-drive-back...
    - hedora 6y ago
      According to that article, they also snoop on the content of any files stored in Drive. To think, just a decade ago, this article seemed paranoid, to the point where even the author seemed to think it was an oversight in the Terms of Service: https://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/will-google-drive-snoop-inside-your-data-google-needs-to-be-clearer/ https://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/will-google-drive-snoop... Interestingly, they give (gave?) themselves redistribution and performance rights for Drive contents at the same time. How long until they start openly using those rights, I wonder?

whalabi 6y ago

2 years ago, I openly wondered why Google gives AMP preferential treatment when they already have the ability to rank pages by speed. AMP is about control, not speed: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed

neophyt3 6y ago

what about AMP stories

saos 6y ago

What about the toxicity that’s AMP for email?

tyingq 6y ago
Google doesn't seem to have the same kind of leverage to push that idea around. Or at least, hasn't chosen to use it.

GuB-42 6y ago

It is not the end of AMP. In fact, I suspect it will only affect the small minority of sites that work better without AMP, the ones everyone who dislike AMP talk about. But for most mainstream news sites, I find AMP better than the typically bloated non-AMP version. And I bet Google will have the same opinion when ranking sites. This is excellent news, but unfortunately, I don't think it will change the situation much. I wish it would, but most websites owners simply don't care about performance.

inshadows 6y ago

> I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. So I know nothing about AMP, but I've skimmed through the Google's documentation of signed exchanges, and it seemed like a good thing. I assume that it is the foundation of AMP. Isn't the point of signed exchanges that you, the publisher, don't have to invest in beefy servers and CDNs, and instead rely on third parties (for fee or free) to store the (signed) content? Of course AMP being a Google service the monopoly thing is hard to ignore. > AMP created all kinds of problems, from analytics to ad serving to logins. Oh no, it hinders competition with Google for surveillance and ad spam!

dane-pgp 6y ago
It's a pity you're being downvoted (perhaps because of the sarcastic tone of your final sentence), as I think you are right about Signed Exchanges. The technology could have some useful non-evil applications. I wrote another comment in this discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024415

jsnell 6y ago

Previous discussion (208 comments). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498

donohoe 6y ago

I’m rebuilding a leaderboard for news articles, switching from WebPageTest to Lighthouse. The next step is to highlight when your need page hits the right benchmarks to qualify for “Top Stories” My worry is that most sites won’t qualify and AMP continues https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz

pdenton 6y ago

The article says "The largest and most talked-about item in the update is Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile." Can anyone please explain what "passing core web vitals" means? It links to very lengthy articles full of SEO jargon that I don't understand.

sergiosgc 6y ago
Use the Google Search Console to check for Core Web Vitals problems. Look for the "Experience" section on the left menu.
- pdenton 6y ago
  Unfortunately, that requires a Google account, which requires a valid phone number. Is this different from PageSpeed Insights? If not, why doesn't PageSpeed Insights suffice? All I'm doing is creating websites that are as accessible and easy to use as possible. I shouldn't need to sign up and give my data to Google to do that. HTML5 (with CSS and JS) and HTTP is all I should have to deal with, registering for search engines seems backwards to me.

tyingq 6y ago

I was hoping I'd start seeing notable amounts of non-AMP stories in the carousel. Just tested it with some news type query strings, and it's not the case yet.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bjt2n3904 6y ago

The most frustrating issue with web development is fads. Every month there's a new must have technology that spreads with the most powerful marketing technique: FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt. "Did you hear about AMP? Yeah we switched to it last week. I heard Google would start weighting pages that didn't use it down. Wait, you haven't made the switch yet? Well... I don't know, we'll see what happens..." If I smell FUD as a marketing technique, I'm out. The odds that you're trying to sell me something I don't need are astronomical -- and in four years, management will be driving me to the next big fad under FOMO.

tootie 6y ago

Is there a process for off boarding AMP? We serve them now but want to stop. Can we just shut it off or will Google punish us?

tyingq 6y ago
"Who is gonna go first" seems to be an issue. I'm unable to produce a query that sticks any non-AMP result into the front of the carousel. So, everyone seems to be waiting for some notable publication to go first.

IshKebab 6y ago

> This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains. Yeah I won't hold my breath.

defaultname 6y ago

Having AMP controlled and intermediated by Google was always a bad thing. It tainted what ultimately was a good effort, which is taking the enormous scope of web technologies we have now and winnowing them back down again for optimized publishing purposes. And this article does what is often done in the AMP discussion and (disingenuously) demonstrates that you can make a non-AMP page that's smaller/faster than an AMP page. No one ever contested that. No one ever doubted it. But AMP isn't the alternative to your minimalist page, it's the alternative to the grotesquely overloaded media site where over time every single web technology gets smashed into a monstrous, massive pig of a page. Comparing the AMP pages of a news source and what they serve in their "full" web experience and it's absolute night and day. I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.

tomComb 6y ago
AMP was about keeping news content on the web competitive with Facebook instant articles. When Google was forced to cut a deal with News Corp last month (the Australian debacle) that would bring News content from the open web into their News app, AMP became much less important to them anyway. All in all, yes, another loss for the open web, but I think the picture is more complicated then the "AMP is evil" meme.
intergalplan 6y ago
My problems with AMP are: 1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web, 2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do, 3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender) Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.
bashinator 6y ago
> I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains. There are some options for activating reader view even before loading a web site[0]. I imagine it would be a pretty light lift from there, to create an extension that keeps a domain list which automatically prepends the reader view URL prefix. The magic prefix is about:reader?url= [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-enable-reader-view-in-mozilla-firefox/ https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...

john_alan 6y ago

I detest AMP. Every time I fall into it’s clutches I can’t help but feel like I’ve wandered into a trap.

acvny 6y ago

I have always detested AMP. But there was no other way around - if you wanted to appear in google results on top you had to use it.

iou 6y ago

I'm here for this! You have my axe

halotrope 6y ago

It would be such a blessing. Not even going into the obvious ethical and political implications of an AMP-powered web, it simply has broken UX on mobile. On iPhone it is possible to horizontally scroll the pages and then they are stuck in an unreadable state until reload. Seeing only "google.com" in the header is just the icing on the cake. Instead of one click to go to the source page you need to open a menu to go there. It makes me furious every time. IMHO Google really jumped the shark with AMP. Claiming it is for the users good and speed of the web is just hypocrisy. We would not need "accelerated" mobile pages if it was not for the garbage 10mb of trackers that are on every page because it helps them monetize with Google.

ilikenwf 6y ago

As an aside, blocking AMP with uBlock origin and using this userscript removes it entirely, including the annoying delay: https://gist.github.com/ilikenwf/0c732fc3e657f29a0b6f2bad4c473ca5 https://gist.github.com/ilikenwf/0c732fc3e657f29a0b6f2bad4c4...

dqpb 6y ago

Ironically, Google News was totally ruined by AMP.