6 ms·

There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash

mrtksn 5y ago
AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owners. That's evil and drains the last bits of trust I had left for Google.
- 8note 5y ago
  Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites. Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that I'm not happy with too. To re-cap: 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP links are hard to get 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide better experience when logged in since the AMP version is always the non-logged-in version. None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages come as a search results and fast loading results are very valuable for me when skimming to find the right one. Once I find it, I can switch to the full version(but Google makes it harder and harder. maybe this should be 4.).
    - ximeng 5y ago
      4) if you don’t want amp it’s an extra click (once you’ve found the non-amp link) and going back then requires two clicks
    - tyingq 5y ago
      The worst of AMP prior to this story, for me, was the carousel behavior. When AMP rolled out, any story you clicked from the carousel: - Left and right swipe events were hijacked, and sent the user to somebody else's website with a related story! - The back button would go to Google, even if you had right or left swiped as described above...that is, non-google pages were not in the history. Then, not just carousel pages, these applied to all AMP pages: - A very tall banner at the top pushed your content down. It had an [x] button that would send you back to the google search rather than the expected behavior of removing the banner. - Finding the real url was 2 clicks deep And then just the overall weird smugness about calling it an open standard. Even though the "open standard" required including a google-owned javascript file via a <script> tag, and the validator would fail you if you didn't. You weren't allowed to host it yourself.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Everything about AMP is strictly worse in my experience. In Australia, AMP pages load slower, not faster. AMP breaks the iPhone Safari user interface, by not actually scrolling the whole page. The URLs don't represent the actual site to which the user will navigate. Logins break. App-integrated links don't work properly. And on and on. AMP is a cancer on the web enforced by a monopoly for their own shady purposes.
  - tazjin 5y ago
    On Android, Google Translate in Safari doesn't work on AMP pages which I find somewhat ironic.
- selsta 5y ago
  FWIW Amplosion (paid iOS extension to automatically redirect AMP pages) is quite highly ranked on the app store. It clearly isn't only techies that dislike it so much that they actually pay to get rid of AMP.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    Could be, I can't remote-sense feelings but never heard of a non-techie complaining about it. It might have become annoying when sharing though, I think they later made it harder to find the non-amp link(The AMP link looks weird, as if you are sharing the wrong URL). Anyway, the AMP experience was a fresh breath in the world of 10-20 seconds webpage loading times. You see the lightning icon, tap it and the content instantly comes. Swipe right and left to go through the other results and everything is displayed instantly, top notch experience - especially when Googling for stuff from the news websites.
    - selsta 5y ago
      I have found AMP to be an awful experience. It messes with native scrolling physics, pages are often incomplete or straight up broken. It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. Luckily iOS 15 web extensions have solved that problem.
      - mrtksn 5y ago
        > It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. I agree. It's one of the imperfections of the AMP. I like AMP for quickly skimming between the results and then load the original page if I find something lengthy ro read.
        KennyBlanken 5y ago
        It's not an imperfection, it's by design. Reader mode removes ads. It also strips out all the crap the site's UX/UI people use to try and keep you on the site.
    - 5y ago
- worrycue 5y ago
  To me it didn’t really make much of a difference other than preventing me from easily copying the URL.
- matsemann 5y ago
  AMP had an (intentional..?) bug on Firefox for years, making it impossible to scroll in the internal page. Luckily it wasn't a big problem, since Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx, so one didn't get amp links.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    > Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx I guess this is my reminder to mention once again that using a Chrome useragent on FF mobile gets you better search results. It's one of the extensions you can download on FF for Android right now, in fact.
  - eska 5y ago
    At this point I always assume that it’s out of malice instead of incompetence. These kinds of smaller bugs for things that work by default are just too common for Google.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Yes - Google Cloud breaks console logins for Firefox on a regular basis. They’ll eventually respond to a bug report but it’s clearly not a priority, and that can’t be intentional when tiny open source projects have much better automated testing.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I think you may even be overselling the user experience. I feel it was objectively confusing, because it changed the default behavior of the web. A regular user would have had no idea what was going on, just that their content was in front of them, so that's nice, but what next? Are they on Google or the website? When I click a new link why does the whole website change design, is this a different website now? What is going on.
- acdha 5y ago
  > AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. This is factually incorrect: as the allegations noted, there are many cases where AMP slows page load time – it required a megabyte of render-blocking JavaScript with no fallback. I could tell which sites used AMP because they loaded slower and failed entirely if you had a less than perfect network connection — this was quite noticeable on the subway here in DC. I heard plenty of normal people complaining about it because it was a daily occurrence. In addition to scrolling, the other thing which people noticed was that AMP broke the URL for sharing. This had several outcomes: one was that desktop users often got less usable mobile pages but the other was that it made spoofing easier because people trusted the google.com domain. This was used by fake news sites in the 2016 election cycle and at least the Russian government used it to spearphish investigative journalists. They knew all of those risks in advance — and people accurately predicted them in 2015 – and the stated motivation was hard to reconcile with how much less work it would have taken to see the performance benefits by simply incorporating speed into search rankings at a high weight; this suggests that theories about the goal of controlling third-party ad markets were correct.
KaiserPro 5y ago
for me, amp loaded quicker and had way less shit on it that took ages to load (like videos, tracking and stupid animations) Webdevs moaned because it restricted what they could do, which is partially why I liked it. They had to build a page that was fast, rather than fancy. However I do see the downsides, as google owns the stack, limits your choice.
- eska 5y ago
  If you want something more restricted then just use RSS. It’s not centralized like AMP.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    How centralised is AMP in theory and in practise?
    - dmw_ng 5y ago
      Every client everywhere donates Referrer: logs to ampproject.org, which Google run. It's another centralized web log in disguise
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        So it's not centralized at all in other words? Because it's an open standard that anyone can implement, both client and server, right? 100% totally decentralized.
        dmw_ng 5y ago
        AMP requires you load all JS assets from cdnproject.org, which is owned by Google. It is as centralized as it comes
        jeffbee 5y ago
        AMP does not require any such thing. Anyone can implement the AMP cache, there are multiple existing AMP caches, and you can serve AMP without a cache, without in any way impairing the function of an AMP page. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/spec/am...
tyingq 5y ago
AMP was a historical irritant for me, and I do recall the tide turning over time. It was initially hard to criticize it here without your comments being downvoted pretty hard. There were a set of defenders that believed it was solely about page loading time, and that any "trojan horse" accusations were from conspiracy theorists. I think part of it was that the AMP team members were active here, and seemed genuine and competent. I'm somewhat curious how much they knew. This delay thing wasn't the only terrible part of AMP. The initial banner with the [x] button that sent you back to Google was terrible. As is the still-present hijacking of swipes and back button behavior on other people's content. I did an Algolia comment search and can see my AMP rants getting more traction over a 4 year period. Edit: I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  >I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad. This was mainly it. Modern basically-just-text-content sites are hilariously bloated and slow, and this seemed like a genuine attempt to fix it. I remember I defended it for those reasons. It didn't pan out that way, though. Also, I definitely remember AMP critics, or at least skeptics, getting plenty of upvotes from the very beginning, I'm not sure it was that hard to criticize.

AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owners. That's evil and drains the last bits of trust I had left for Google.

8note 5y ago
Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites. Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that I'm not happy with too. To re-cap: 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP links are hard to get 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide better experience when logged in since the AMP version is always the non-logged-in version. None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages come as a search results and fast loading results are very valuable for me when skimming to find the right one. Once I find it, I can switch to the full version(but Google makes it harder and harder. maybe this should be 4.).
  - ximeng 5y ago
    4) if you don’t want amp it’s an extra click (once you’ve found the non-amp link) and going back then requires two clicks
  - tyingq 5y ago
    The worst of AMP prior to this story, for me, was the carousel behavior. When AMP rolled out, any story you clicked from the carousel: - Left and right swipe events were hijacked, and sent the user to somebody else's website with a related story! - The back button would go to Google, even if you had right or left swiped as described above...that is, non-google pages were not in the history. Then, not just carousel pages, these applied to all AMP pages: - A very tall banner at the top pushed your content down. It had an [x] button that would send you back to the google search rather than the expected behavior of removing the banner. - Finding the real url was 2 clicks deep And then just the overall weird smugness about calling it an open standard. Even though the "open standard" required including a google-owned javascript file via a <script> tag, and the validator would fail you if you didn't. You weren't allowed to host it yourself.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Everything about AMP is strictly worse in my experience. In Australia, AMP pages load slower, not faster. AMP breaks the iPhone Safari user interface, by not actually scrolling the whole page. The URLs don't represent the actual site to which the user will navigate. Logins break. App-integrated links don't work properly. And on and on. AMP is a cancer on the web enforced by a monopoly for their own shady purposes.
- tazjin 5y ago
  On Android, Google Translate in Safari doesn't work on AMP pages which I find somewhat ironic.
selsta 5y ago
FWIW Amplosion (paid iOS extension to automatically redirect AMP pages) is quite highly ranked on the app store. It clearly isn't only techies that dislike it so much that they actually pay to get rid of AMP.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Could be, I can't remote-sense feelings but never heard of a non-techie complaining about it. It might have become annoying when sharing though, I think they later made it harder to find the non-amp link(The AMP link looks weird, as if you are sharing the wrong URL). Anyway, the AMP experience was a fresh breath in the world of 10-20 seconds webpage loading times. You see the lightning icon, tap it and the content instantly comes. Swipe right and left to go through the other results and everything is displayed instantly, top notch experience - especially when Googling for stuff from the news websites.
  - selsta 5y ago
    I have found AMP to be an awful experience. It messes with native scrolling physics, pages are often incomplete or straight up broken. It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. Luckily iOS 15 web extensions have solved that problem.
    - mrtksn 5y ago
      > It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. I agree. It's one of the imperfections of the AMP. I like AMP for quickly skimming between the results and then load the original page if I find something lengthy ro read.
      - KennyBlanken 5y ago
        It's not an imperfection, it's by design. Reader mode removes ads. It also strips out all the crap the site's UX/UI people use to try and keep you on the site.
  - 5y ago
worrycue 5y ago
To me it didn’t really make much of a difference other than preventing me from easily copying the URL.
matsemann 5y ago
AMP had an (intentional..?) bug on Firefox for years, making it impossible to scroll in the internal page. Luckily it wasn't a big problem, since Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx, so one didn't get amp links.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  > Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx I guess this is my reminder to mention once again that using a Chrome useragent on FF mobile gets you better search results. It's one of the extensions you can download on FF for Android right now, in fact.
- eska 5y ago
  At this point I always assume that it’s out of malice instead of incompetence. These kinds of smaller bugs for things that work by default are just too common for Google.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Yes - Google Cloud breaks console logins for Firefox on a regular basis. They’ll eventually respond to a bug report but it’s clearly not a priority, and that can’t be intentional when tiny open source projects have much better automated testing.
ehnto 5y ago
I think you may even be overselling the user experience. I feel it was objectively confusing, because it changed the default behavior of the web. A regular user would have had no idea what was going on, just that their content was in front of them, so that's nice, but what next? Are they on Google or the website? When I click a new link why does the whole website change design, is this a different website now? What is going on.
acdha 5y ago
> AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. This is factually incorrect: as the allegations noted, there are many cases where AMP slows page load time – it required a megabyte of render-blocking JavaScript with no fallback. I could tell which sites used AMP because they loaded slower and failed entirely if you had a less than perfect network connection — this was quite noticeable on the subway here in DC. I heard plenty of normal people complaining about it because it was a daily occurrence. In addition to scrolling, the other thing which people noticed was that AMP broke the URL for sharing. This had several outcomes: one was that desktop users often got less usable mobile pages but the other was that it made spoofing easier because people trusted the google.com domain. This was used by fake news sites in the 2016 election cycle and at least the Russian government used it to spearphish investigative journalists. They knew all of those risks in advance — and people accurately predicted them in 2015 – and the stated motivation was hard to reconcile with how much less work it would have taken to see the performance benefits by simply incorporating speed into search rankings at a high weight; this suggests that theories about the goal of controlling third-party ad markets were correct.

KaiserPro 5y ago

for me, amp loaded quicker and had way less shit on it that took ages to load (like videos, tracking and stupid animations) Webdevs moaned because it restricted what they could do, which is partially why I liked it. They had to build a page that was fast, rather than fancy. However I do see the downsides, as google owns the stack, limits your choice.

eska 5y ago
If you want something more restricted then just use RSS. It’s not centralized like AMP.
- mavhc 5y ago
  How centralised is AMP in theory and in practise?
  - dmw_ng 5y ago
    Every client everywhere donates Referrer: logs to ampproject.org, which Google run. It's another centralized web log in disguise
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      So it's not centralized at all in other words? Because it's an open standard that anyone can implement, both client and server, right? 100% totally decentralized.
      - dmw_ng 5y ago
        AMP requires you load all JS assets from cdnproject.org, which is owned by Google. It is as centralized as it comes
        jeffbee 5y ago
        AMP does not require any such thing. Anyone can implement the AMP cache, there are multiple existing AMP caches, and you can serve AMP without a cache, without in any way impairing the function of an AMP page. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/spec/am...

tyingq 5y ago

AMP was a historical irritant for me, and I do recall the tide turning over time. It was initially hard to criticize it here without your comments being downvoted pretty hard. There were a set of defenders that believed it was solely about page loading time, and that any "trojan horse" accusations were from conspiracy theorists. I think part of it was that the AMP team members were active here, and seemed genuine and competent. I'm somewhat curious how much they knew. This delay thing wasn't the only terrible part of AMP. The initial banner with the [x] button that sent you back to Google was terrible. As is the still-present hijacking of swipes and back button behavior on other people's content. I did an Algolia comment search and can see my AMP rants getting more traction over a 4 year period. Edit: I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.

LordDragonfang 5y ago
>I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad. This was mainly it. Modern basically-just-text-content sites are hilariously bloated and slow, and this seemed like a genuine attempt to fix it. I remember I defended it for those reasons. It didn't pan out that way, though. Also, I definitely remember AMP critics, or at least skeptics, getting plenty of upvotes from the very beginning, I'm not sure it was that hard to criticize.