6 ms·

Resigning from the AMP Advisory Committee

81 points by robin_reala 5y ago

thepangolino 5y ago
I really never got the point of AMP being anything else than a set of recommendations for lighter mobile pages. A sort of remnant of the time where you got redirected to another version of the website you were visiting if you were doing so from a mobile device.
- vasachi 5y ago
  The point is to prevent user from leaving google.com.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I also remember that if you also tried to share the webpage, it was awkward to try and get the non-AMP page, taking the other user to Google.com.
- DrBenCarson 5y ago
  The point is Google keeps users captive and content publishers hostage. All for a glorified CDN serving “light” static pages.
- SevenSigs 5y ago
  The main problem with AMP is that everything loads from Google's servers... so it is not worth using even if sometimes it can be faster (Google itself should probably use it instead of their javascript mess that slows down everything for no reason).
- pornel 5y ago
  The AMP project allowed Google to dictate how ads can be served, and host publishers' pages themselves. Don't forget Google is a tracking-based advertising company. It was very convenient that these things could be bundled in a package with some webdev best practices, a JavaScript framework, and marketed as a (questionable) speed improvement. I've worked for a publisher that abandoned serving their own fast no-JS article pages in favor of half-assed AMP pages full of slow iframes, because Google favored any use of AMP over actual page speed. It took Google many years to ease that AMP favoritism.
- rakshazi 5y ago
  The ironic part of AMP is that it's heavely relies on js. External js. For example, you have a lightweight website with size of 140kb for everything (html, CSS, js, images) without AMP. It works blazing fast and you get 100/100 scores on any website speed meter. But it was not enough for google, because you don't use their super-duper AMP tech. You known what? Your website doubles in size when you implement AMP, because you must load several additional scripts to make AMP work, and not only size increases, load time (from click on your website link till full render) will increase too, because additional js processing to make AMP work. The only benefit was preloading and heavely caching by Google, so user feels like website shows instantly. I "optimized" several lightweight websites with AMP and every time I had exactly one thought in mind - that's useless stuff adds more problems than benefits, except mobile search ranking. Thanks God now AMP is not mandatory to be in google mobile search top
  - esprehn 5y ago
    Do you have some examples of sites where the regular site is faster than the AMP one?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dbbk 5y ago
      Literally anything that doesn’t use JS and is CDN cached?
      - esprehn 5y ago
        Do you have real world examples of that though? Nearly every real world news, facts, recipe, cooking blog, etc I can find loads huge amounts of JS. Ex. Here's Snopes: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210818_BiDcQB_f0db4233292161bd37819affda183b8c/ https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210818_BiDcQB_f0db4233292... For sure a static site is faster than AMP, but I'm pretty sure AMP is faster than most sites regular folks visit on a daily basis.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dmitriid 5y ago
  AMP was first and foremost an answer to Facebook's Instant Articles (or whatever they were called), and, as an extension, a death grip on publishers. Everything else in AMP served that.
ohazi 5y ago
> So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It's best for other members of the committee, and perhaps for the sanity of the author, but I think you could make the argument that effective sabotage of the AMP project could actually be best for the public at large.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Why would Google take advice from non-employees? Committees like this only serve to shield Google from criticism. They aren't meant to accomplish anything.
stefan_ 5y ago
This is a bit embarrassing. You joined the committee when AMP was already dead in the water and even now it seems this has not been made to clear you.
- SevenSigs 5y ago
  even if you are telling the truth, you are being downvoted for talking bad about a specific individual... have my upvote.
skybrian 5y ago
He seems disappointed but it sounds about what I’d expect from an “advisory committee.” I would expect giving advice to be a form of influence rather than power. You’re only as good as your persuasive skills and their willingness to listen.
throw_m239339 5y ago
I don't like AMP. However, if I wouldn't use a mobile browser which didn't basically do the same (MITM websites), my DATA plan would be over by the fourth day of the month. The mobile web, after all these years, is still so heavy. No, devs don't need all images to be for retina display, they don't need to bundle 50 MB of JS on ever pages, they don't need to load custom fonts for text, auto start videos, ... then why are webpages still so big on mobile? What happened to mobile first? Seems to me like it's just native app first on mobile then some amount of responsiveness for desktop websites... what happened? I'm not willing to visit or spend money on a website that drains all my data plan while I'm browsing for products... For all the SEO tricks websites use to drive traffic, it doesn't seem like mobile page speed is relevant in anyway when it comes to SEO or we would have a very different web...
- ohazi 5y ago
  Firefox mobile allows you to use uBlock origin, which improves things tremendously. Every time I accidentally end up in mobile Chrome, it's like being transported back in time 15 years with popups and overlays and modals that are deliberately designed to lag just enough for you to accidentally click on the ad rather than the tiny X button. What happened? Google happened. The mobile web is essentially the desktop web before ad blockers, and Google won't allow mobile Chrome to support extensions because "oh no, extensions are hard" -- they're lying. They know that a mobile ad blocker is the easiest and fastest way for us to hide their toxic cesspool of mobile ads.
- albertgoeswoof 5y ago
  That’s only a problem in countries with poor network infrastructure, most developed countries have unlimited data plans at reasonable costs
  - forcemajeure 5y ago
    Not true in Australia
    - 8ytecoder 5y ago
openasocket 5y ago
> We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing court case in the AMP advisory committee. That’s fair enough. But will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google’s behalf be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, “But AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the banner of the OpenJS Foundation.” Google's lawyers will most likely do something like that, though . But there's nothing stopping you from contacting the prosecution and offering testimony against the claim that AMP is open source. Unless the AMP advisory committee is somehow considered a party in the lawsuit? Though even then, depending on how the committee works, I don't think they could ban you from communicating with the prosecution. Actually I'd expect members of the advisory committee to be deposed. The prosecution explicitly mentions the AMP committee in their suit: "Although Google claims that AMP was developed as an open-source collaboration, AMP is actually a Google-controlled initiative. Google originally registered and still owns AMP’s domain, ampproject.org. In addition, until the end of 2018, Google controlled all AMP decision- making. AMP relied on a governance model called “Benevolent Dictator For Life” that vested ultimate decision-making authority in a single Google engineer. Since then, Google has transferred control of AMP to a foundation, but the transfer was superficial. Google controls the foundation’s board and debates internally" . Both Google and the prosecution will likely depose members of the committee to get testimony regarding those facts.
gregable 5y ago
I won't try to address every part of this writing, but there is one claim that I feel is false: namely that the AMP validation rules are not open source. Here is the code: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/main/validator https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/main/validator All of the rules are written in human-readable config language. Here are the rules for common HTML elements (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/validator/validator-main.protoascii https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/validator/va...) and there are rules per-amp-tag (example: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/amp-vimeo/validator-amp-vimeo.protoascii https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...) You can build it, run it locally, etc. There are open-source implementations that run in the browser, in a vscode plugin, on the command line via NPM, etc. Other entities can and do use the same code for their validation of AMP. Pull Requests are accepted from anyone and those changes land in Google production and all of the aforementioned tooling targets within a few days. There is documentation on how to contribute to and edit these files (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/component-validator-rules.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/compone...).
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > namely that the AMP validation rules are not open source. Here is the code Yes. That's the trick big corps play on you. They develop some code, and push it to GitHub. - all of the decisions where the code is going belong to the corp - all (or at the absolute vast majority) of contributions come from the corp's developers - there's little to no insight into why things are the way the are. Sometimes you can be big enough to gain acces, or important enough. Before "open governance" it was some publisher group set up by Google that was supposedly there to monitor But sure, it's open source. > Pull Requests are accepted from anyone and those changes land in Google production 1. What's the ratio of PRs from Google employees to those from "anyone"? 2. Indeed. They land in Google production. The company with $183 billion in yearly revenue thanks you for your unpaid contributions (if they ever make it) --- BTW, there are 1 500 open issues in that repo. Quite a lot for some validation rules.
  - gregable 5y ago
MrStonedOne 5y ago
I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up: > As a mobile user, I hate it. > I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon > I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user > I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means > I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars. > I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick > I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature. > I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url. > I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode. > And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers. > AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.
- junon 5y ago
  Agreed with all of your statements but would love some links to prose or examples of your last point.
josefrichter 5y ago
Btw it’s Potemkin, not Potempkin
SquareWheel 5y ago
I'd be curious if there has been any effort made towards encouraging wider use of the Amp Cache. After CloudFlare dropped theirs, now only Google and Microsoft maintain an Amp Cache. Large search engines are probably the primary audience for that technology, so would there be interest from Baidu or Yandex?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Twitter still runs one, right? In general it'd make sense for any app where link sharing is a major use case. Reddit, for example. It'd also make sense for Facebook and Apple, except they have their proprietary formats for exactly the same use case that people have no problem with (Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News). So not a lot of incentive to switch.
  - gregable 5y ago
    My memory (might be incorrect) is that both Twitter and LinkedIn use the Google cache directly, rather than running their own.
    - jsnell 5y ago
      Thanks, looks like you're right.
PedroBatista 5y ago
This whole thing is a ruse. These "committees", "work groups", "boards" and even the "foundations" are just ways to legitimize things that tend to be illegitimate. Every dictatorship has a "parliament", "courts" and a "constitution", there is nothing new or original about this AMP ordeal.
redis_mlc 5y ago
I laughed off AMP when it was announced, and I'm glad I did. Before and after AMP I've been using static HTML for homepages - can't get any faster, compatible across any device. Bam!

81 points by robin_reala 5y ago

I really never got the point of AMP being anything else than a set of recommendations for lighter mobile pages. A sort of remnant of the time where you got redirected to another version of the website you were visiting if you were doing so from a mobile device.

vasachi 5y ago
The point is to prevent user from leaving google.com.
- heurisko 5y ago
  I also remember that if you also tried to share the webpage, it was awkward to try and get the non-AMP page, taking the other user to Google.com.
DrBenCarson 5y ago
The point is Google keeps users captive and content publishers hostage. All for a glorified CDN serving “light” static pages.
SevenSigs 5y ago
The main problem with AMP is that everything loads from Google's servers... so it is not worth using even if sometimes it can be faster (Google itself should probably use it instead of their javascript mess that slows down everything for no reason).
pornel 5y ago
The AMP project allowed Google to dictate how ads can be served, and host publishers' pages themselves. Don't forget Google is a tracking-based advertising company. It was very convenient that these things could be bundled in a package with some webdev best practices, a JavaScript framework, and marketed as a (questionable) speed improvement. I've worked for a publisher that abandoned serving their own fast no-JS article pages in favor of half-assed AMP pages full of slow iframes, because Google favored any use of AMP over actual page speed. It took Google many years to ease that AMP favoritism.
rakshazi 5y ago
The ironic part of AMP is that it's heavely relies on js. External js. For example, you have a lightweight website with size of 140kb for everything (html, CSS, js, images) without AMP. It works blazing fast and you get 100/100 scores on any website speed meter. But it was not enough for google, because you don't use their super-duper AMP tech. You known what? Your website doubles in size when you implement AMP, because you must load several additional scripts to make AMP work, and not only size increases, load time (from click on your website link till full render) will increase too, because additional js processing to make AMP work. The only benefit was preloading and heavely caching by Google, so user feels like website shows instantly. I "optimized" several lightweight websites with AMP and every time I had exactly one thought in mind - that's useless stuff adds more problems than benefits, except mobile search ranking. Thanks God now AMP is not mandatory to be in google mobile search top
- esprehn 5y ago
  Do you have some examples of sites where the regular site is faster than the AMP one?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dbbk 5y ago
    Literally anything that doesn’t use JS and is CDN cached?
    - esprehn 5y ago
      Do you have real world examples of that though? Nearly every real world news, facts, recipe, cooking blog, etc I can find loads huge amounts of JS. Ex. Here's Snopes: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210818_BiDcQB_f0db4233292161bd37819affda183b8c/ https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210818_BiDcQB_f0db4233292... For sure a static site is faster than AMP, but I'm pretty sure AMP is faster than most sites regular folks visit on a daily basis.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dmitriid 5y ago
AMP was first and foremost an answer to Facebook's Instant Articles (or whatever they were called), and, as an extension, a death grip on publishers. Everything else in AMP served that.

ohazi 5y ago

> So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It's best for other members of the committee, and perhaps for the sanity of the author, but I think you could make the argument that effective sabotage of the AMP project could actually be best for the public at large.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Why would Google take advice from non-employees? Committees like this only serve to shield Google from criticism. They aren't meant to accomplish anything.

stefan_ 5y ago

This is a bit embarrassing. You joined the committee when AMP was already dead in the water and even now it seems this has not been made to clear you.

SevenSigs 5y ago
even if you are telling the truth, you are being downvoted for talking bad about a specific individual... have my upvote.

skybrian 5y ago

He seems disappointed but it sounds about what I’d expect from an “advisory committee.” I would expect giving advice to be a form of influence rather than power. You’re only as good as your persuasive skills and their willingness to listen.

throw_m239339 5y ago

I don't like AMP. However, if I wouldn't use a mobile browser which didn't basically do the same (MITM websites), my DATA plan would be over by the fourth day of the month. The mobile web, after all these years, is still so heavy. No, devs don't need all images to be for retina display, they don't need to bundle 50 MB of JS on ever pages, they don't need to load custom fonts for text, auto start videos, ... then why are webpages still so big on mobile? What happened to mobile first? Seems to me like it's just native app first on mobile then some amount of responsiveness for desktop websites... what happened? I'm not willing to visit or spend money on a website that drains all my data plan while I'm browsing for products... For all the SEO tricks websites use to drive traffic, it doesn't seem like mobile page speed is relevant in anyway when it comes to SEO or we would have a very different web...

ohazi 5y ago
Firefox mobile allows you to use uBlock origin, which improves things tremendously. Every time I accidentally end up in mobile Chrome, it's like being transported back in time 15 years with popups and overlays and modals that are deliberately designed to lag just enough for you to accidentally click on the ad rather than the tiny X button. What happened? Google happened. The mobile web is essentially the desktop web before ad blockers, and Google won't allow mobile Chrome to support extensions because "oh no, extensions are hard" -- they're lying. They know that a mobile ad blocker is the easiest and fastest way for us to hide their toxic cesspool of mobile ads.
albertgoeswoof 5y ago
That’s only a problem in countries with poor network infrastructure, most developed countries have unlimited data plans at reasonable costs
- forcemajeure 5y ago
  Not true in Australia
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago

openasocket 5y ago

> We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing court case in the AMP advisory committee. That’s fair enough. But will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google’s behalf be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, “But AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the banner of the OpenJS Foundation.” Google's lawyers will most likely do something like that, though . But there's nothing stopping you from contacting the prosecution and offering testimony against the claim that AMP is open source. Unless the AMP advisory committee is somehow considered a party in the lawsuit? Though even then, depending on how the committee works, I don't think they could ban you from communicating with the prosecution. Actually I'd expect members of the advisory committee to be deposed. The prosecution explicitly mentions the AMP committee in their suit: "Although Google claims that AMP was developed as an open-source collaboration, AMP is actually a Google-controlled initiative. Google originally registered and still owns AMP’s domain, ampproject.org. In addition, until the end of 2018, Google controlled all AMP decision- making. AMP relied on a governance model called “Benevolent Dictator For Life” that vested ultimate decision-making authority in a single Google engineer. Since then, Google has transferred control of AMP to a foundation, but the transfer was superficial. Google controls the foundation’s board and debates internally" . Both Google and the prosecution will likely depose members of the committee to get testimony regarding those facts.

gregable 5y ago

I won't try to address every part of this writing, but there is one claim that I feel is false: namely that the AMP validation rules are not open source. Here is the code: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/main/validator https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/main/validator All of the rules are written in human-readable config language. Here are the rules for common HTML elements (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/validator/validator-main.protoascii https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/validator/va...) and there are rules per-amp-tag (example: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/amp-vimeo/validator-amp-vimeo.protoascii https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...) You can build it, run it locally, etc. There are open-source implementations that run in the browser, in a vscode plugin, on the command line via NPM, etc. Other entities can and do use the same code for their validation of AMP. Pull Requests are accepted from anyone and those changes land in Google production and all of the aforementioned tooling targets within a few days. There is documentation on how to contribute to and edit these files (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/component-validator-rules.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/compone...).

dmitriid 5y ago
> namely that the AMP validation rules are not open source. Here is the code Yes. That's the trick big corps play on you. They develop some code, and push it to GitHub. - all of the decisions where the code is going belong to the corp - all (or at the absolute vast majority) of contributions come from the corp's developers - there's little to no insight into why things are the way the are. Sometimes you can be big enough to gain acces, or important enough. Before "open governance" it was some publisher group set up by Google that was supposedly there to monitor But sure, it's open source. > Pull Requests are accepted from anyone and those changes land in Google production 1. What's the ratio of PRs from Google employees to those from "anyone"? 2. Indeed. They land in Google production. The company with $183 billion in yearly revenue thanks you for your unpaid contributions (if they ever make it) --- BTW, there are 1 500 open issues in that repo. Quite a lot for some validation rules.
- gregable 5y ago

MrStonedOne 5y ago

I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up: > As a mobile user, I hate it. > I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon > I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user > I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means > I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars. > I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick > I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature. > I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url. > I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode. > And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers. > AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.

junon 5y ago
Agreed with all of your statements but would love some links to prose or examples of your last point.

josefrichter 5y ago

Btw it’s Potemkin, not Potempkin

SquareWheel 5y ago

I'd be curious if there has been any effort made towards encouraging wider use of the Amp Cache. After CloudFlare dropped theirs, now only Google and Microsoft maintain an Amp Cache. Large search engines are probably the primary audience for that technology, so would there be interest from Baidu or Yandex?

jsnell 5y ago
Twitter still runs one, right? In general it'd make sense for any app where link sharing is a major use case. Reddit, for example. It'd also make sense for Facebook and Apple, except they have their proprietary formats for exactly the same use case that people have no problem with (Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News). So not a lot of incentive to switch.
- gregable 5y ago
  My memory (might be incorrect) is that both Twitter and LinkedIn use the Google cache directly, rather than running their own.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    Thanks, looks like you're right.

PedroBatista 5y ago

This whole thing is a ruse. These "committees", "work groups", "boards" and even the "foundations" are just ways to legitimize things that tend to be illegitimate. Every dictatorship has a "parliament", "courts" and a "constitution", there is nothing new or original about this AMP ordeal.

redis_mlc 5y ago

I laughed off AMP when it was announced, and I'm glad I did. Before and after AMP I've been using static HTML for homepages - can't get any faster, compatible across any device. Bam!