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Honest question from someone completely oblivious to AMP. What problem was AMP trying to solve? "Make websites load faster" is a buzzword-flag to me, and it's n

Honest question from someone completely oblivious to AMP. What problem was AMP trying to solve? "Make websites load faster" is a buzzword-flag to me, and it's not really explained in the wikipedia article [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

DevKoala 5y ago
> What problem was AMP trying to solve? Preserve Google’s control of the ad exchange monopoly; according to allegations in the latest antitrust case. https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1451619916994396164 https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/145161991699...
- dmart 5y ago
  To expand on this, Google introduced an artificial delay when loading ads on non-AMP pages: https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467 https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467
nightpool 5y ago
From a technical perspective, AMP had two, intertwined goals: 1) allow third parties to safely rehost your page, so that they could provide a seamless preloading experience—fetch & render the page in the background, and display it to the user immediately when they click a link. This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets. 2) Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX, forcing developers to get rid of layout shifts, weird scroll effects, and other things that made mobile web browsing a nightmare. This framework allowed for a limited subset of HTML and CSS, but no custom JS, allowing it to enforce these rules for all rehosted pages.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX And this is huge. Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing. AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP. Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.
  - rsanheim 5y ago
    AMP pages have been far more annoying in my experience. It breaks the standard web controls (ie no tap on the top to scroll to top), breaks copying links, and locks you into the google ecosystem at the user's expense. Thank goodness its falling out of favor.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      IMO the issues with controls are worth the tradeoff. The alternative ends up being annoying sites like arstechnica (non-AMP) which relocates content while you're reading it.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    > Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. I addressed this in another comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423), but I disagree. The fundamental problem is one of incentives—individual companies don't have the leverage to fight back against ad companies and advertisers that want to implement bad user experiences and slow loading JS. Google's adoption of AMP forces publishers and ad networks fall into line, by enforcing limits on floating ads, popover, interstitials, custom JS, etc. Is this self-interested on Google's part? Maybe. But it's hard to argue that it's not ultimately better for the consumer.
    - 5y ago
- acdha 5y ago
  > This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets Kind of, some of the time. In practice, that massive amount of render-blocking JavaScript made it slower - I noticed this on a daily basis using the web on the subway here in DC. The Washington Post loaded consistently faster without AMP, but the big win was the long tail where you could read content on normal pages but AMP was either blank until you reloaded, or took 5-10 seconds longer because once the AMP JS loaded it then had to fetch all of the resources it’d blocked behind a lazy-loader.
jeffbee 5y ago
AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are all evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating technical staff to make the right choice for users. This is why your average local newspaper or TV station site downloads 100MB of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and needs 10-60s to render on your phone. AMP puts these jerks in a straightjacket while also trying to ensure they still get paid. Theoretically there's a marketplace where better/faster news sites would be preferred by readers, but in actual fact all the news outlets are owned by the same guy.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are all evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating technical staff to make the right choice for users. Don't forget how they sit on top of piles of money bags twirling their mustaches, taking lollypops from children, and cackling "Ha ha ha ha ha!" while looking down on the plebs below. Don't forget that!
- afavour 5y ago
  > This is why your average local newspaper or TV station site downloads 100MB of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and needs 10-60s to render on your phone No, the reason for that, almost all of the time, is ads. It's true that local news rarely hires talented developers (they don't have the money) but even if they did they'd still be at the mercy of shitty ad code written by shitty ad providers. One of which is Google! So they generously solved the problem they created by setting up a new walled garden.
IshKebab 5y ago
They made websites faster by restricting what you could do with them. For the average shitty news website it made an enormous difference.

DevKoala 5y ago

> What problem was AMP trying to solve? Preserve Google’s control of the ad exchange monopoly; according to allegations in the latest antitrust case. https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1451619916994396164 https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/145161991699...

dmart 5y ago
To expand on this, Google introduced an artificial delay when loading ads on non-AMP pages: https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467 https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467

nightpool 5y ago

From a technical perspective, AMP had two, intertwined goals: 1) allow third parties to safely rehost your page, so that they could provide a seamless preloading experience—fetch & render the page in the background, and display it to the user immediately when they click a link. This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets. 2) Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX, forcing developers to get rid of layout shifts, weird scroll effects, and other things that made mobile web browsing a nightmare. This framework allowed for a limited subset of HTML and CSS, but no custom JS, allowing it to enforce these rules for all rehosted pages.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX And this is huge. Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing. AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP. Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.
- rsanheim 5y ago
  AMP pages have been far more annoying in my experience. It breaks the standard web controls (ie no tap on the top to scroll to top), breaks copying links, and locks you into the google ecosystem at the user's expense. Thank goodness its falling out of favor.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    IMO the issues with controls are worth the tradeoff. The alternative ends up being annoying sites like arstechnica (non-AMP) which relocates content while you're reading it.
- nightpool 5y ago
  > Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. I addressed this in another comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423), but I disagree. The fundamental problem is one of incentives—individual companies don't have the leverage to fight back against ad companies and advertisers that want to implement bad user experiences and slow loading JS. Google's adoption of AMP forces publishers and ad networks fall into line, by enforcing limits on floating ads, popover, interstitials, custom JS, etc. Is this self-interested on Google's part? Maybe. But it's hard to argue that it's not ultimately better for the consumer.
  - 5y ago
acdha 5y ago
> This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets Kind of, some of the time. In practice, that massive amount of render-blocking JavaScript made it slower - I noticed this on a daily basis using the web on the subway here in DC. The Washington Post loaded consistently faster without AMP, but the big win was the long tail where you could read content on normal pages but AMP was either blank until you reloaded, or took 5-10 seconds longer because once the AMP JS loaded it then had to fetch all of the resources it’d blocked behind a lazy-loader.

jeffbee 5y ago

AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are all evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating technical staff to make the right choice for users. This is why your average local newspaper or TV station site downloads 100MB of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and needs 10-60s to render on your phone. AMP puts these jerks in a straightjacket while also trying to ensure they still get paid. Theoretically there's a marketplace where better/faster news sites would be preferred by readers, but in actual fact all the news outlets are owned by the same guy.

reaperducer 5y ago
AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are all evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating technical staff to make the right choice for users. Don't forget how they sit on top of piles of money bags twirling their mustaches, taking lollypops from children, and cackling "Ha ha ha ha ha!" while looking down on the plebs below. Don't forget that!
afavour 5y ago
> This is why your average local newspaper or TV station site downloads 100MB of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and needs 10-60s to render on your phone No, the reason for that, almost all of the time, is ads. It's true that local news rarely hires talented developers (they don't have the money) but even if they did they'd still be at the mercy of shitty ad code written by shitty ad providers. One of which is Google! So they generously solved the problem they created by setting up a new walled garden.

IshKebab 5y ago

They made websites faster by restricting what you could do with them. For the average shitty news website it made an enormous difference.