
Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it - luu
https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed
======
joegahona
I'd love for Google to explain the justification for putting _only_ AMP
content in the "Top Stories" carousel. Google needs to either rename the
carousel to be "Top AMP stories" or allow non-AMP stories to appear in the
carousel. Isn't the whole purpose of search to prioritize the most relevant
content, regardless of the type of HTML used to create it?

~~~
justinph
I've asked the AMP team exactly this and they punted and demurred on the
subject and said they have some vague plans to some day make it also contain
sites that are as fast as AMP.

The AMP team will tell you that they are concerned with making the web faster,
and it's the _search_ team that controls the carousel. Which is all well and
good, but I can tell you that the _only_ reason any publisher is doing AMP is
because they want the placement in the carousel and better search results.

As far as I can tell, google has no intention of ever allowing non-amp content
they can't re-serve from their cache and add whatever analytics and tracking
they want to from being ranked highly. AMP is a tactic to let them track the
most lucrative mobile web users and take control away from publishers of
original content.

~~~
ehnto
There is nothing about an AMP page that makes it inherently faster until it
lands in and is served by a Google regional cache server. Otherwise my site is
going to be just as fast. I can make just as fast web pages and serve them
from a server sitting in the same state as my customers. There will be no need
for Google level scale for my site as it is regional. Yet I still get put
below AMP sites.

From many different angles, AMP getting preferential treatment is heavy handed
and clumsy, manipulative and forcing technology standards on the web that no
one agreed on.

~~~
underwater
AMP limits what the page can do, and allows Google to safely serve content
through a cache. So Google can preload and prerender the page in an iframe. As
a result clicks on the carousel are literally instant. That can't be done
safely with a regular HTML page.

~~~
warent
I can't help but wonder what problem they're solving for. Is there a huge
market of people clamoring to make webpages load faster than they already do?

~~~
krageon
You should try loading "the modern web" over a not great but passable phone
connection (ie 3G maximum) on a non-flagship phone. Nearly every normal
website you will have an exceedingly bad time on. That's what AMP claims to
solve. Far be it from me to claim they succeeded or that they are doing it in
the right way, but I think pretending the problem doesn't exist at all is
disingenuous.

~~~
StreamBright
Why not fixing “the moder web” then?

~~~
r3bl
Because convincing all the website owners to do anything (even if it clearly
benefits everyone) is an impossible task.

See HTTPS adoption.

~~~
StreamBright
HTTPS adoption:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018...](https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/04/253fa7e9-ssl.png)

Great example. You just proved my point that it is possible to have positive
change in large communities.

~~~
r3bl
I'm not sure that graph shows what you think it shows.

That graph shows that there's an obnoxiously large number of websites that
don't support something that there's zero reason not to support.

It costs $0 and takes _maybe_ half an hour to implement, browsers are
screaming "not secure" to each visitor, and one in five websites _still_ don't
support it. "Make websites faster", on top of being vague, is way more
difficult to implement.

~~~
piva00
1 in 5 NOT supporting it is much better than the opposite when I started
working in the web where 90+% of websites didn't support HTTPS.

------
thethirdone
> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of
> CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small,
> arbitrary limit.

I think for static articles 50kb should be plenty. The linked page itself uses
only 35kb and a third of that is fontawesome. And 32kb of that is actually
unused without javascript enabled. So the site only uses 3kb, but 50kb is
absurdly small?

This site (Hacker News) gets by with 2 kb.

~~~
codegoblins
To be fair, HN looks like it was designed in the mid-2000s

~~~
rangerpolitic
And yet it works.

The problem is designers and their bosses/clients. They equate design with
looks. As a result, they see design as solving the problem of aesthetic. They
fail to realize this is a problem which very few people care about on the web.
So long as it passes the smell test of credibility, no one cares. (Excluding a
handful of cases.)

As a result, we, the users, must suffer.

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
That‘s true only for (some) tech-literate people. Everyday users will quickly
think something looks ugly/old/cluttered when compared to the other apps/sites
they use.

I‘m an outlier on this site because I generally like redesigns and all that
comes with modern web stuff (white space, rounded corners, flat, light drop
shadow, generally clean and option for dark mode).

I find it‘s easy to test. Take a redesign you didn‘t think was necessary and
then look at it 3 years later. Design changes over time. It‘s just life.

HN for some reason did age decently because it‘s very spartan and minimal. I
like it. Even mobile is fine for reading. Not so much for contributing though.

Edit: Actually, everyday users might not care much either way. UNTIL some
other site with similar functionality comes along but looks much more modern.
Or if the site is trying to get new users.

~~~
rangerpolitic
"I like" is precisely the mistake I am addressing.

Design is not about what one likes. It is about what helps one solve a
problem.

Web designers and their bosses/clients reduce "design" to the creation of the
look-and-feel of websites. For them, design is all about how something looks.
This is something which is highly subjective.

The flaw in this is that it's not how users think. Users have a job-to-be-
done. A good design is one that helps them accomplish that job. A better
design is one that helps them accomplish that job better, faster, or easier. A
bad design is one which doesn't help them or makes it worse.

Consider a monolingual English speaker using an ATM in China. You will never
hear them say, "Well, I can't get my money because I don't understand Chinese.
However, this ATM looks so nice I'm going to try to use it again."

It doesn't matter how great that ATM looks if the user cannot accomplish their
task.

Yes, aesthetics have a place, but it's a very diminished place of importance.
Aesthetics is much less important than most web designers and bosses/clients
think.

It's time they get over themselves and start thinking about users.

------
jrockway
> For a start, anyone contributing to AMP is required to sign a contributor
> license agreement (CLA) for their code to be accepted into the project

This is pretty standard. You have to sign one to contribute to _Emacs_.

~~~
rpdillon
I noticed this too, and immediately thought of the FSF. But I kept reading and
thought this was different:

> Note, you don’t grant these rights to the AMP Project, you grant them to
> Google. Google owns the code and patents.

~~~
vlovich123
This is standard. Copyrights are assigned to the body that owns the project.
For EMACS this is FSF, for AMP this is Google. The only time it's something
different is if a project is owned by a foundation just for that project but
super common in the OSS world. Have you done much OSS development?

~~~
Wehrdo
Why don't projects let you sign away your copyright so your contribution
becomes public domain? Is that even possible?

~~~
ufo
In many countries authors aren't allowed to put the code under the public
domain. To avoid these issues it is instead preferred to provide an explicit
copyright license.

[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1371/](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1371/)

------
xyzal
A reminder to all AMP-haters like me: When using Firefox mobile, Google search
results become free of AMP crap.

Also, you get the added benefit of a browser whose maker has no interest in
tracking your every move.

~~~
vanderZwan
And it has extensions like desktop browsers do, including ones that remove
even more modern website bloat

~~~
gourou
You mean built-in extensions or can you add some now?

~~~
matoro
You have always been able to use every desktop extension on mobile FF, at
least as long as I have been using it.

~~~
asdff
Android or iOS?

~~~
Max_Mustermann
Android. iOS's firefox is Safari (like every browser on the iPhone) with a
firefox overlay.

------
ww520
Microsoft was sued by DOJ by bundling IE with the OS. Google is doing a
similar thing with AMP. They are walking a fine line.

~~~
kkarakk
you don't HAVE to use google search. everyone just prefers it. people prefer
bing for searching videos(less censorship) and duck duck go for more organic
results.

i don't think the AMP carousel is anything but a feature. people need to stop
treating companies as services. products can go away in the blink of an eye.

~~~
cyborgx7
Why is there constant advocacy to do away with anti-trust laws on this
website?

~~~
kkarakk
how is it violating anti-trust is what i want to know. you don't put your
website on google amp so google ranks you lower - they've told you this
upfront. if you don't like google amp you can choose to not support it and
take the advertising/SEO hit(which is really a monetary hit)

except no, people say they are "forced" to use google amp. well duh, google
was also "forced" to make amp due to the shitty way people design websites in
general(slow, ads in awkward places leading people to install ad blockers etc
etc)

amp is inevitable in my opinion - the old style of ads are intolerable to most
users now and google needs to keep up since ads are their core business

~~~
cyborgx7
using your monopoly to force another one of your products on people violates
anti-trust law

that's how

------
mtaksrud
Google needs to be split up and shut down. Why aren’t the American authorities
using the antitrust laws that is already there?

~~~
sfifs
Basically because the current philosophy of the US justice department anti
trust prosecutions is whether market dominance of the player harms ordinary
people or causes them to incur higher cost. It is not really about actual
monopoly power. Google has been pretty careful to stay consistent with this
philosophy.

This wasn't always so in the US and it's not the same philosophy in EU.
However, it is a valid and consistent view.

~~~
telltruth
Corollary 1: You are legally allowed to kill all of your competition while not
improving your monopoly product as long as you keep your product free.

Corollary 2: Human attention is considered equivalent to monetary value of
exactly $0 by US government.

Corollary 3: You should never trust your government to be smart or do right
thing for you.

~~~
sfifs
Counterpoint: If you strongly want your government to change its approach,
organize to change the government.

In US, it's very safe to do this without violence but even in significantly
less safe places, people have successfully done this peacefully [1] [2] [3]

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Delhi_Legislative_Assem...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Delhi_Legislative_Assembly_election)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_West_Bengal_Legislative...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_West_Bengal_Legislative_Assembly_election)

[3]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2005_Bihar_Legislati...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2005_Bihar_Legislative_Assembly_election)

------
sergiotapia
\- Killing the web with AMP

\- Killing email with gmail specific garbage

\- Killing mobile phones with walled gardens

\- Killing browsers by implementing their own spec and fuck everybody else

\- Killing open source tools by releasing closed source extensions for VS Code

Google has done a complete and total 180 in the past 10 years. I remember when
the name inspired and made you feel safe that this thing you were using was
made with character and thought to your well-being. Now it's a dry-heave
feeling having to touch anything Google.

~~~
tomComb
\- Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple.

\- Yeah, that gmail specific stuff is evil, except it isn't gmail specific at
all.

\- Yeah, killing browsers with Chrome. Just like IE6 except it's open source,
cross-platform, evergreen, and pushes standards forward rather then trying to
subvert them. The biggest problem now is others like MS using their browser
engine is reducing diversity, but I guess that's their fault for making it
open source. evil!

\- And yeah, they have now officially destroyed VSCode (which includes lots of
closed source MS stuff) by releasing a closed source extension.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
These arguments don’t invalidate OP’s critique of Google’s positions though.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right)

~~~
tomComb
Your only two options on mobile are Apple & Google and he is calling out
Google (in fairly extreme terms) on a point where they are easily the better
of the two.

It shows what a silly contortion he was going through to tell us to hate
Google.

------
taytus
Hi, full disclosure I'm the founder of a company providing AMP services.

You can hate and have valid arguments against AMP, but... on this article, in
particular, where is the data?

How can people comment and form an opinion based on basically nothing?

Am I missing the "before and after" links with the benchmarks?

~~~
whalabi
(Author here)

You can run the test yourself on the AMP and non-AMP versions of an identical
article to see yourself.

(Note: sometimes the numbers are off the first couple of times you run tests.
If you run them multiple times, the AMP articles tend to score (sometimes
significantly) lower.)

Non-AMP: [https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-
speed](https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed) (Results:
[https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh](https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh))

AMP: [https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-
speed](https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed) (Results:
[https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi](https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi))

Edit: More data here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846)

~~~
taytus
The AMP version gives me better results:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.37.39.png?dl=0)

Non AMP
version:[https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.40.12.png?dl=0)

My email is on my profile if you want to talk about this. Maybe we can help.

Edit: If you compare against the cached version, the version that your mobile
users are going to hit, the results are much much better:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-04-10%2021.44.23.png?dl=0)

~~~
DCoder
> _My email is on my profile_

The 'Email' field in the profile is not visible to other users. You should add
it to the 'About' field.

~~~
taytus
Updated. Thank you.

------
ronlobo
I am wondering when the EU is finally giving this BS a fine.

------
0xfaded
The irony is that the web version of google news on mobile is horrendously
slow. Hackernews seems to have good performance though, maybe they can take
some design cues.

------
amgin3
AMP has totally ruined the internet for desktop users. ~90% of AMP sites don't
even provide a link to the full desktop version of the page (unless you want
to dig through the source code of the page, but even then it is hit and miss),
and AMP sites are linked to more and more on social media sites like reddit.

------
headsoup
I think the most fundamental issue here is that organisations are rebuilding
their websites with AMP to align to Google search, when Google search is not
the only search product available (much as you could believe otherwise from
the discussion!).

How did all the work this company did add any value for someone using
DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia, etc considering the site was already fast?

This type of activity is a bad outcome.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Bing also preloads AMP pages, so this work would add value for Bing users.
[https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-
Blog/September-2018/Introdu...](https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-
Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache)

Same with Baidu. [https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-
pages-e...](https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-
expansion-yahoo-japan-baidu-china/)

------
pcarolan
Google isn’t the web. To make the point that they’re dictating web standards
is like saying that walmart makes people sick by only placing unhealthy
products on their end caps. Like it or not, it is Google’s store and if you
don’t like it, sell your wares in the Whole Foods down the street (duck duck
go) or find a more creative channel than SEO (Instagram, podcasts, Twitter,
etc).

~~~
taurath
Google isn’t the web like the banking system isn’t the only way to move money
- you can do it, but it’s really really difficult and if you have business
ambitions it’s almost certainly the wrong choice to avoid it.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t think Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) spends too much time worrying
about SEO and Google. He built a solid reputation with excellent idea and he
did this strange model of getting people to pay money for stuff - over 3000
people to pay him $100 a year to read his content.

------
geggam
Soon enough Google will face the fate of Ma Bell

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Be split up only to later recombine into a larger entity?

~~~
jessaustin
...at tremendous profit to executives and bankers. All of the resources that
various investors sank into building "competing" infrastructure, consumed
through strong-armed acquisitions as everyone slowly realized that FCC was
just as opposed to competition as they always have been.

------
kristianp
Practically, they probably weren't faster than their AMP page on mobile as a
search result, because of preloading and google CDNage of the AMP cache of the
page.

~~~
acdha
That’s the sales pitch but I usually notice AMP pages because they take so
long to render at all, waiting for a ton of JavaScript to load before anything
displays. Mobile caches are small and unless you hit Google a lot in the same
browser you see those delays frequently compared to sites which follow other
Google teams’ recommendations for performance.

------
crazygringo
Can someone explain _how_ an AMP page would possibly be slower?

Especially given Google's CDN and the fact it's likely to be preloaded in
practice?

I find myself wondering if this isn't just some artifact of the Chrome tool
being used to measure performance -- especially since that tool reports an
overall score like "94", not an actual speed -- and the weightings it uses [1]
could be different from what AMP is designed specifically to speed up. Also it
would have to be measured across a wide variety of locations worldwide, etc.,
certainly if the author's webserver is in their own city, for example.

A _lot_ more data, measured rigorously, would be needed to prove that AMP is
actually slower in practice -- it's a bold claim.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring)

~~~
lllr_finger
Unless things have changed, you can't think of it as a real CDN. The Google
engineer assigned to our AMP launch told us to think of it as a proxy without
actually calling it that. Our testing showed that to be an accurate
description of how it worked in practice.

------
kristianp
This link on the page is dead (404): [https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-
google-is-creating-the-o...](https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-
creating-the-one-page-web)

Edit, apparently it should be linked from here, as the title and url of the
article has changed: [http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-
page...](http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page-web)

~~~
whalabi
Thanks! Fixed :)

------
Romanulus
Thus far, this whole AMP business seems like Google's tech-tipped thrust to
control information (apart from their other methods thus far).

~~~
lllr_finger
It's definitely control, but it's almost a lesser of three evils - it's no
coincidence that as a large web publisher at the time, we were approached by
Google, Facebook, and Apple at almost the same time and asked to deliver
content for their respective walled gardens.

I'd happily choose the web over the other two alternatives. Sure it'd be great
to have an open standard achieving the same thing as AMP, but it's 2019 and we
haven't seen it yet.

~~~
Romanulus
I just think they are going about it in a pushy yet guarded way. I'd prefer
good architects over good architecture as it breeds creativity/variety

------
Causality1
Why the hell does AMP and AMP alone get the privilege of hijacking chrome
mobile's menu bar and hiding it from the user until we scroll all the way up
to the top of the page and then drag it back down? It's like they've never
heard of tabbed browsing before.

~~~
jjtheblunt
"Why the hell use Chrome?" : a corollary, no?

~~~
Causality1
Good tab management, to be honest. Other mobile browsers like Firefox and the
Adblock browser have issues where swiping the tab away only works in a
specific direction or in a very straight line, or is annoyingly difficult when
the device is in landscape mode because you have to swipe twice as far for
some reason, or the UI for opening the tabs page is inconvenient.

------
C1sc0cat
All good points. But not sure why "unlike kinds" should actually be featured -
lets be honest your not exactly a household name in publishing.

Its hard enough getting a major publishing brand accepted by google as a news
publisher.

------
JohnFen
I personally have a choice about AMP pages -- I ignore them. AMP blows, and if
I can't get a non-AMP version of a page, that page doesn't exist for me.

------
cphoover
Google AMP needs to die...

------
tflinton
Why on earth do we look to this bizarre for technical capability?

------
dcbadacd
People say AMP is disgusting, but I say that the alternative is even worse.
Just go visit delfi.ee, postimees.ee, õhtuleht.ee and you'll see how damn
bloated sites become if there's no market pressure to leanness.

~~~
acdha
This is true but consider an alternate history where Google cared more about
web performance than pushing sites to adopt their proprietary JavaScript
toolkit: search rankings would simply incorporate page performance/size
measured in real browsers and all of those sites would have a strong incentive
to reduce page weight and they could load faster without needing 100KB of AMP
JavaScript to successfully load before they start rendering.

~~~
dcbadacd
I'd be glad if that alternate history were the case, but currently AMP seems
to be the lesser evil. AMP doesn't make my laptop's fans spin up.

~~~
acdha
I use Firefox’s content blocking and haven’t had that happen in years except
on new installs where I forgot to disable WebM.

~~~
dcbadacd
I don't use Firefox because my hardware is super weak and hardware
acceleration is a must for most things for me - FF doesn't do that.

------
pizzamoney
Why in the earth you would use Google s sandbox es ?

------
kevmo
Google/Alphabet needs to be broken up.

------
hexo
so, kill google news. who cares about it anyway and if anyone do I just don't
get why. google platform stinks more than anything ever microsoft did

~~~
zapzupnz
Google News is a very useful tool for a lot of people trying to find coverage
from sources other than the select few that they might often frequent. I use
it to find how international articles affect my country, my area, etc. I also
use it to find articles in other languages.

Aside from that, Google News content is heavily integrated into the normal
Google Search pages. It's not simply a matter of simply ignoring it; Google
makes their Google News results some of the top results for searches for
current events.

~~~
hexo
Yes it certainly is matter of ignoring it. Only not ignoring that stuff gives
it credibility as we gave microsoft products.

~~~
zapzupnz
If you think the majority of people are going to ignore what Google posts as
the most relevant search result, I don’t think there’s anything more I can say
to dissuade you.

------
jocoda
From the article:

>... the position on Google’s results that can literally mean the difference
between a failed business and one that makes millions of dollars

looks to me like your business is the tail, and here you are trying to wag the
dog.

------
gdsdfe
I think breaking Google's monopoly over search is the biggest challenge that
nobody is trying to solve ... Maybe nobody's knows how to, maybe nobody's
willing to invest in such endeavor but I hope people will realize soon that
the cost of doing nothing is becoming much higher than the cost of trying ...
And yeah I know there's duckduckgo but we need at least 2 or 3 much better
duckduckgo's

------
dagenix
This article would be much more interesting if they showed that the AMP
version of the page actually was slower than the non-AMP version. Instead,
they just say that Google's Page Speed score is lower for the AMP version. But
_nobody_ cares about the Page Speed score - it's just a rough proxy for user
experience. The author of the article, however, doesn't do anything to look at
actual user experience.

------
dmethvin
AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for
a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most
sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's
"nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists
on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably
only use one or two.

~~~
stephenr
AMP is google flexing its control over the web.

If Google wanted to highlight fast/penalise slow sites, they could simply
measure the load time of a site when they index it.

But that would only achieve their _stated_ goals, it wouldn’t achieve their
_actual_ goals.

~~~
thrwwysearcheng
Throwaway Google search engineer here. People here really do care about making
the web faster and moving metrics, both because that is how the company is set
up to reward employees but also because they believe it makes the product
better. Google has been penalizing slow sites forever. It stopped moving the
needle (I suspect because it isn’t marketable). Amp on the other hand really
is working, metrics show a faster, smoother experience, and user studies have
been positive. That’s why Google is doubling down so much with it. Not because
they have goals to control content providers or wall off the web, but because
it makes a dramatic difference on the whole.

~~~
stephenr
So if the "only" goal of AMP is to make things faster, why isn't the carousel
based purely on "your result must load in < X ms"? If a company can "force"
other companies to adopt AMP, it can surely "force" them to improve load times
on their own.

Also, if speed is their goal, why does the _mandatory_ AMP 'boilerplate'
include a CSS-driven 8 second delay before content is shown, that is _removed_
if the client loads the AMP JS?

Oh right. I know the answer. It's to give the impression that blocking third-
party resources (such as AMP JS) via e.g. a content blocker, won't make the
site faster. Which as we know, is a load of shit.

You might have the best of intentions and donate your entire salary to
homeless blind children - that doesn't mean for a second that I believe
google's _actual_ goals with AMP are anything less than exerting more control
over the web for their own purposes.

------
pagespeedisb
One point here: stop using Google Pagespeed Scores unless you're having
serious speed issues that need correcting.

Google only uses this in an incredibly small way, yet I've seen SEO people at
multiple companies hammering on it like it's some magical SEO juicer. It's
not. Just don't be in the bottom 10% (Google uses a slice even smaller than
10%).

I like that Google wants the web to be faster, but if I could axe one product
that causes a lot of angst, it's that damn pagespeed score.

------
xiphias2
,,50kb is an absurdly small.... responsive queries so that your site looks
great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and
iPhone.)''

Why would I need CSS for iPhone? I don't have an iPhone. Also I'm now browsing
from my laptop, so I don't need mobile specific CSS either. Isn't there a way
for the responsive site to load CSS specific to the device/display?

~~~
untog
No. _Especially_ not with AMP, because Google sits between you and your user
so you never get to know what device they are using.

In theory on your own site you could use user agent sniffing to worn out what
CSS to send, but it's still not a great idea because you'll be wrong at least
some of the time.

~~~
33degrees
User agent sniffing is how we ended up with things like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows
NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36"

~~~
sgjohnson
Hey, you weren't kidding. Mine is

    
    
      Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1 Safari/605.1.15

------
auslander
Google today is a single gateway where business go to sell and users go to do
anything. Its a monopoly power. Nothing will change until there are better
alternatives. Binq is big but stupid. DDG is too small. Apple, Amazon,
Facebook, CDNs should all create _good_ search engines, and allow SE
aggregators to live.

------
joering2
Until Google will allow me to block whole swaths of IPs in effort to lower
spam getting into my Inbox, I don't care much about other upgrades.

For few months now it seems to me that Sparkpost is a favorite choice of
spammers. Perhaps its the low cost or maybe its because they never ever
answered to a single spam@sparkpost.com email I send forwarding abusers
content. None, zero nada! I can report someone... silence... an then 3 days
new letter pops up from a new domain (but same IP) from Sparkpost.

That's why I need to be able to block whole IPs.

------
seanwilson
> Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of
> CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small,
> arbitrary limit. Stylesheets these days handle resets for normalising
> behaviour between browsers, grid systems so you can lay things out without
> resorting to murder-suicide, and responsive queries so that your site looks
> great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and
> iPhone.) These essential components will take you a decent way to to the
> 50kb already.

As far as I know, the 50KB limit is per page. I can't see why a typical single
page should require that much CSS where the CSS included is actively used on
that page. If you're going to include e.g. the CSS for every Bootstrap
component on every page you're easily going to go over the limit but the whole
point of the limit is to discourage you from doing that.

The OP article should only require a modest amount of CSS I think, same for
most pages. People here hate on AMP a lot, but "avoid excessive CSS" is a good
guideline in my opinion.

