
Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed - adwmayer
https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/01/google-amp-cache-amp-lite-and-need-for.html
======
rubyn00bie
I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing
(DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me).

Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page
loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to
use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard
since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.

Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered
server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we
don't we should be second class citizens.

More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this
choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query
are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this
primarily true with historical content or localized content where the
host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken.
Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they
can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the
top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality
results.

I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP
otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.

Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will
be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just
that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.

~~~
macNchz
I switched my default search engine on my phone from Google to DuckDuckGo
because I got sick of the growing number AMP links, which I also don't like
for all the same reasons you listed.

They are a bad reminder of the early days of the mobile internet when lots of
websites would automatically redirect you to a terrible 'mobile version'. I
certainly want better mobile sites, but not in the form of these AMP pages.

~~~
monochromatic
AMP annoys my too, but it hadn't occurred to me to switch to DuckDuckGo. Good
idea, just made the change.

~~~
tdkl
It sure would be awesome if Chrome on Android had it available as an option.
But, it's Google.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
If you trust APKs from random strangers on the internet, here's my custom
Chromium for Android build with DDG support:
[https://sr.ht/dIQO.apk](https://sr.ht/dIQO.apk)

Here's the patch that adds it to the list of search providers:
[https://sr.ht/h4bZ.patch](https://sr.ht/h4bZ.patch)

~~~
tdkl
Thanks, I tried some Chromium based browsers on the Play Store, but they all
have unreliable or even non working Chrome Sync. I'd go full FF, if scrolling
on Android wasn't so jerky compared to Chrome.

------
franze
I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ...
all regret it.

The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse
than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an
AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the
AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them.

And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic
impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.)

Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to
our site...".

AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.

~~~
fixermark
Question: Why do you not then just switch off the AMP support and stick with
responsive pages? It sounds like you just generated an A/B test with some
pretty easy-to-interpret results.

~~~
franze
a) for deleting amp you need to implement some ping logic
[https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-
ping#remove-a...](https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping#remove-
amp-content)

b) deleting page(variations) big scale is always a traffic risk

c) deleting AMP it's already discussed (by literally everybody), so it will
happen (soon...ish)

d) the one reason not to do it is currently market monitoring. even though
there is currently no major traffic benefit doesn't mean there will not be one
in the future. so it's just a question of when the pain of AMP gets greater
than the market-surveillance / curiosity / traffic bet.

Basically everybody who currently has AMP pages is the experiment guinea pig
for the whole industry.

My bet: Most of the AMP implementations won't survive 2018.

------
saycheese
There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional
elements into a page that are detectable by the average user.

Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage
of users opting out should be published real-time.

As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

~~~
ClassyJacket
It also sucks if you want to interact with the page, since, inanely, you can't
click through to the real page.

~~~
wmf
What can you do on the real page that you can't do on the AMP version?

~~~
unclebucknasty
Navigate the site, share the underlying page, etc.

------
tiffanyh
There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe
unfairly.

Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat
has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be
4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch.

I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on
mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in
parts of the world still on 2G or 3G.

If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need
to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal
blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.

~~~
fragmede
You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor
excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is
using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the
URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain.

No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone
attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar"
which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well,
what happened to them?

Now, I'm visiting
[https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne...](https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2F/poltics..).
in order to get content from NBC News, while
[http://www.nbcnews.com](http://www.nbcnews.com) works just fine. The writers
of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not
news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on
www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google
and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in
"site:www.nbcnews.com article name".

I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the
URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract
that AMP breaks.

Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which
"rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present
the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same
thing to news publishers.

~~~
bsimpson
If browsers detected AMP pages and treated the address bar accordingly:

Cached from: nbcnews.com/some-article

Would you feel better about it?

~~~
msbarnett
Under no circumstances should web browsers be hard-coding special favors to
paper over deficiencies in the user experience of Google's news product.

The entire idea is insane. Google is just another company on the internet, and
should be treated like any other.

~~~
ponderingthings
SVG was Adobe's open implementation of the ideas of behind Macromedia Flash.
It solved a real pain (the lack of vector support on the Web) and has been
implemented by all the browsers. Does this upset you? Most of the progress of
the web platform is sponsored by companies like Adobe and Google.

AMP is a curated subset of web functionality designed to load quickly and be
safely cacheable. Like SVG, it's an open attempt to solve deficiencies in the
platform. It's been sponsored by Google and adopted by a lot of their
properties, but it's unfair to call it "Google's news product."

~~~
msbarnett
SVGs are displayed whether or not they're hosted on Adobe's servers.

What other servers are serving AMP pages, (edit: and would benefit from this
"cached from <other site>" URL bar display logic) other than Google's news
product?

~~~
detaro
All the publishers Google copies the AMP from? Google could just redirect
mobile users to that if they wanted, as can every other site linking to a
page. If they then also got rid of the requirement of loading the AMP JS from
a CDN Google runs, they'd actually have something resembling an open
standard...

~~~
msbarnett
> All the publishers Google copies the AMP from?

But all of those URLs display correctly.

We're talking about having browsers add special-case logic in which some URLs
on one particular special domain (news.google.com) belonging to one private
company (Google) are treated and displayed differently than everything else on
the internet.

> If they then also got rid of the requirement of loading the AMP JS from a
> CDN Google runs, they'd actually have something resembling an open standard

Sure, if this turned into an actual Open standard, and we were talking about
extending browser display logic to any server on the internet that served an
AMP page belonging to some other site, that would make sense.

But having browsers bless one company's subdomain with special rules that
apply only to it is about as anti-open web as you can get.

~~~
detaro
> _But having browsers bless one company 's subdomain with special rules that
> apply only to it is about as anti-open web as you can get._

I totally agree with you on that. They could easily get rid of their cache
domain for serving AMP, or people could build browser extensions and other
projects avoiding it while still using AMP, but only because all the
publishers behind it already serve AMP if you ask for it. Which is why I made
the point that it is not just Google serving it, which I clearly should have
explained better.

------
maverick_iceman
I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having
slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been
an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so
they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is
true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in
would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable
to opt-in.

~~~
liquidise
I think you are missing the disagreements with AMP entirely. Google, with
_less_ effort, could have released a series of requirements for a page to be
considered "AMP"ed: (examples) 0 blocking script requests, less than 500KB in
total page load, page loads in under 1s, etc. Once your pages meet these
requirements, they gain the AMP moniker.

Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. This
engineering effort can not be ignored and it was not on accident that this
happened. They are quite literally stealing the traffic of users who implement
AMP.

~~~
fixermark
What you're describing has already been done.

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/)

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/)

It didn't work.

And given that the solution to Google "stealing" a site's AMP traffic is that
site just stops supporting AMP, the "stealing" argument doesn't hold a lot of
water. If I'm a small publisher, Google caches taking page hits on popular
topics instead of my server is a boon, not a hindrance.

~~~
liquidise
A few disagreements with your analysis: AMP was given a wide spread
announcement that generated an unusual amount of press. It was impossible to
ignore. If page speed was such an important (and viable) solution, google
could simply have announced they would more heavily favor sites that performed
well.

Also, not supporting AMP is not a casual decision for some companies. My blog
doesn't earn me revenue so i can happily tell google to pound sand before i
support AMP. Can revenue-driven publishers due the same and sacrifice their
SEO like that? I doubt it.

> Google caches taking page hits on popular topics instead of my server is a
> boon, not a hindrance

I simply cannot disagree with this more. Your most popular posts/topics are
what generally drive the viewership and discovery of your site. I _want_ those
viewers. With AMP, they are looking at google, with a google URL, and a nice
big "X" to close the window, never to see my site again. I don't see how this
can be defensed at all. It is the exact opposite of what you are aiming for as
a publisher, big or small.

~~~
fixermark
What stops you from providing links to additional content on your site on the
amp-enabled page?

You seem to be assuming there's a category of user who is casual enough that
they'll page away after reading the one amp story, yet if they'd been on your
content-originating site instead, they'd be like "Oh, now that I've read that,
I should go click these links and read other things from this source!"

I'm not sure why we think those users exist.

------
jzl
The most annoying thing about AMP is that there is no way to get the original
link easily. I don't necessarily mind reading the AMP version, but if I
bookmark or share the link I want to be able to use the original and not
Google's copy. Whose to say the AMP link will work as long as the original
copy? And what if I explicitly want to use the result as an entryway into the
site because I might be looking for other similar articles on the site or need
other aspects of the full site experience? AMP seems like it could be maybe be
a good thing, but the lack of a method to get a link to the original article
exposes AMP, IMO, as the traffic and power grab that it really is.

~~~
alpb
I strongly agree with this. The other day I was searching something on my
phone and stumbled upon the result in Reddit, which was using AMP. I clicked
the result, the AMP UI was loaded but the content area had an ever-spinning
loading icon. It was frustrating, I thought maybe it was my ad-blocker on iOS,
so I disabled it and tried it in Safari's Incognito mode. No luck...

After 5 minutes of diverting from my main task and try to debug what is wrong
with this, I gave up and just removed the AMP URL prefix to head for the
actual Reddit website (not sure how a non-poweruser would figure this out).
There was simply no other way to reach the information I needed from the
Google Results page which did not let me leave the AMP page.

Either Reddit was broken at the moment or something with AMP or something with
my mobile client. But the web is supposed to "just work" and Google is
seemingly breaking that with AMP. I am certain it helps some people reach to
content easier with less data costs but if only it "just worked".

------
greenspot
I have a bad feeling. Google is creating a proprietary version of the mobile
Internet, a layer between them and us. Looking at the specs, it's open but
paired with the AMP cache and Google's ranking algorithm which already clearly
prefers AMPed pages it doesn't feel like a free choice.

What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if
I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes
25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites
without following the AMP spec?

~~~
mikecb
Cloudflare just launched their own amp cache. Nothing proprietary about this.

~~~
saurik
As far as I can tell, to do this they had to partner with Google, who are the
arbiters of what is and is not AMP compatible. This is absolutely
"proprietary" and honestly pisses me off even more than if it were _only_
Google's servers in charge of this stuff as now they are screwing with the CDN
market as well :/. An open standard is something anyone can implement and be
compatible with, without permission.

~~~
mikecb
You may take from the story what you wish, but afaik, the collaboration you're
referring to was informal engineering discussion, not required permission. I
can't charitably get to your interpretation from the blog posts or public
comments by those at CF.

~~~
saurik
[http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-
amp-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-2017-1)

> So while Google means well here, Prince says, AMP hasn't been as open as
> publishers were perhaps hoping it would be. You still have to give your
> content over to Google to take advantage, which is suboptimal for
> publishers.

> This is where Cloudflare swoops back into the picture. By working with
> Google as the first AMP partner, Cloudflare is contributing to making AMP "a
> really open standard," Prince says. And this announcement of loading mobile
> AMP pages seems subtle, but it's the first time that these lightning-quick
> pages are served out of Cloudflare's system, and not Google's. It's
> something publishers have been asking for.

If it were possible to just host the AMP content using another CDN not blessed
by Google it would have been trivial for these publishers--almost all of whom
certainly are using CDNs such as Akamai--to host their own content. It is only
by being an "AMP partner" that this seems to have been possible. Do you have
any evidence on the other side of this? I ask because from my perspective I
can't "charitably" get to _your_ interpretation given the reading I did on
this subject.

~~~
mikecb
I think the amp partner term is silly. If akamai wanted to, they could host
their own cache. There is no evidence that Google is doing anything but
encouraging cdns to do so.

------
c0l0
"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably
loads fast [...]"

Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP
'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the
open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch
that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a
disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth
the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication
with your actual users.

~~~
CaptSpify
"Instead of helping sites to solve the problem, we'll take care of it for
them! And no need to worry about vendor lock-in, we're 'not evil', remember?"

I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as
a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve
is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers
and complexity is the opposite approach that they should be taking.

~~~
cmac2992
I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize
you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of
other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.

~~~
CaptSpify
Have they? I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely curious because I guess I don't ever
see that happening. Whenever I search for something that has a bunch of
results, like weather, I end up with 30s loading, JS-filled, nightmare sites
that are slow, bulky and don't show the information in a clean format. Yet
there are good, simple sites like
[http://myfreeweather.com/](http://myfreeweather.com/) that are ~8 pages into
the results.

I don't pretend to know half of the metrics they use to rank a site, but IME,
it doesn't seem like speed is at all relevant.

~~~
accountface
It's part of the algorithm, but it's not enough to offset the fact that a
bloated site like weather.com gets astronomical amounts of traffic from all
sources (direct, paid, organic).

It's more like if you had two sites with identical traffic and identical
content relevancy the faster site would rank higher... which makes sense.

If your site is incredibly popular, it's logical to think that people are
finding it useful and therefore it should rank higher. That's less true than
it used to be, but it's still valid as one of the primary ranking metrics.

~~~
CaptSpify
I guess I see it as chicken and egg problem: Is the site popular because it's
one of the top results? or is it the top result because it's popular?

I've seen too many of the former to believe Google is trying to push the
later.

------
andy_ppp
To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them
caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to
believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google
controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are
everything now.

EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP
cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay
publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.

~~~
shostack
This is in essence what happened with FB Instant Articles. Many publishers are
hurting from it because their CPMs dropped and they didn't get people on their
properties. They didn't really have a choice in the matter though. Some, like
BuzzFeed have adapted their models to thrive in this new reality.

Google is thus trying to keep people in their "feed" and reduce the cost of
their ad inventory by (in theory) reducing publisher payouts over time as a
result of this leverage.

------
CameronBanga
AMP is breaking the web, and while it offers great speed, I think the
consequences of breaking and hijacking all urls greatly outweighs the
advantages.

Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.

~~~
claudius
AMP offers no more or less speed than standard HTML. Even on a slow
connection, the majority of that slowness is due to the last mile, not because
it takes a long time to get data from Europe to Australia.

It really is only about getting yet another way to collect data on users and
push ads down their throats.

~~~
fixermark
AMP addresses the last-mile concern by constraining the content of the page to
mitigate both low-bandwidth connections and low-power rendering agents.

Have you used it? Even on a Nexus 5x running on fast wifi, the difference
between loading a Washington Post site from AMP and from washingtonpost.com is
tangible.

~~~
claudius
This is absolutely the fault of the publisher, not of anyone else. If the
people running that site wanted to offer a slim and fast experience, they
could absolutely do so without including additional Javascript from god-knows-
where and whatever other “features” AMP requires.

------
zorked
Contrarian view: I love AMP and I find myself clicking AMP links far more
often because I can get the information I want much faster. And this is on
LTE.

AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.

~~~
asdfologist
I thought I'm the only one. It's really fast and easy to use. I don't
understand all the hate here.

~~~
brainfire
Site operators are mad that they can't ruin our experience as thoroughly any
more.

------
MrVitaliy
I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I
switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search
is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.

~~~
artimaeis
Can you detail the issues you've had with AMP pages? I use Safari on iOS 10.2
daily and have never noticed an issue loading AMP pages.

~~~
MrVitaliy
I'm on iOS 10.2 also. Searching for something like "site:reddit.com casserole"
gives a couple of AMP results. Clicking them just shows google loading circle
thingy indefinitely, the page never opens.

~~~
djrogers
I just did this on my iPhone, and it worked instantly. In fact I've never seen
an AMP page that doesn't load...

My guess would be that you have a content blocker, ad blocker, anonymizing
proxy, DNS server with ad-blocking, or something in your setup that's breaking
it, because it's not broken natively.

~~~
stuckagain
I also confirm this works fine for me on Safari and iOS 10.2 (iPhone SE, not
that I think it matters).

~~~
enraged_camel
It doesn't work for me, and never has. Also on Safari and iOS 10.2.

------
anilgulecha
I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like
infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations
and solutions, without a large affect on the users.

I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the
issue of content delivery under resource constraints.

~~~
neilcarpenter
AMP is open -
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml)

~~~
pmlnr
If I can't host it, it's not open, end of story. With AMP, it's always by
google.

This is not open, there is no source, because AMP is a hosted service.

------
timsayshey
I tried to share an AMP article from Gizmodo with my wife the other day. I
just texted her the link that I copied from my Firefox Mobile browser. She
said it was broken. And sure enough, it was broken. What a pain, the url only
works for me? Edit: wording

------
dfischer
I absolutely hate AMP. I don't understand it at all. In fact, I completely
ignore the benefits – this is simply due to the UX. Any link I see with AMP in
it makes me want to not tap on it on my phone. It's seriously a horrible
experience on iPhone. The entire navigation is uncanny valley territory. I
don't have a detailed reason why, but I know that when trying to use the
browser I'm frustrated and want to leave. This feels like a poor move.

------
Groxx
It'd be _far_ more useful if they benchmarked rendering speed for pages (game-
able, obviously, but so is everything), and just favored faster ones. AMP
could be one of many systems then, instead of taking as much control as
possible.

Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to
do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image
compression, optimized http2 support, etc).

Kill it with fire.

------
matthewmacleod
I definitely agree with the overall feeling on HN – AMP is probably one of the
_worst_ things to happen to the open web.

I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have
a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken
half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.

------
Panino
I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people
who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!")

From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people
drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual
presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most.
Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger
to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!")

IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important
ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong.
I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.

~~~
acdha
> From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people
> drawing pictures with HTML editors.

One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true – and
that makes sense because when you look at the average sluggish site the bloat
is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source.

What's actually happening is that a bunch of people are working hard on
something which is important to them but not the user: advertising and
analytics, followed by “social” sharing. Since those numbers are associated
with revenue, they're directly seen as important whereas concerns about page-
weight are more subtle and often an inadequate check on bloat until it gets
really bad.

~~~
Panino
> One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true

Although I reject the idea that popular websites are representative of the web
in general, let's investigate that anyway. Currently on the HN homepage:

1\. Netflix blog post scores 73/100 and 85/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights.

2\. Flickr post gets 67/100 and 83/100 on PageSpeed.

3\. Google's own post gets 61/100 and 79/100 -- oops!

4\. gatech.edu gets 66/100 and 82/100.

All bad, decided to stop there. Even many/most popular pages are bad (careful
reading shows that I didn't say all) . This jives with what I've seen as
someone who looks at Google PageSpeed Insights A LOT.

> average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML
> source

Someone "drawing pictures with HTML editors" as I said is still going to add
JavaScript, images, css, etc. They'll also specifically add tons of
unoptimized images that aren't even losslessly optimized, let alone put
through manual lossy optimizations. I bet the average webmaster can't even
define lossless and lossy.

FWIW I think AMP is just awful. In contrast, Google PageSpeed Insights is
_amazing_. I _adore_ the PageSpeed website and recommend it wholeheartedly.
It's been a huge help to me.

The solution to this mess is competition, not centralization. Make speed a
major ranking signal and let the ecosystem say goodbye to those who can't
hang.

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

------
pmlnr
"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and
geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color
samples if they are higher than necessary."

Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image.

These things should be opt-in.

~~~
mathw
They are. You don't have to publish an AMP version.

~~~
rch
That's what I thought as well. If you're publishing special images and JS then
don't include AMP metadata.

Some of the concerns really should be addressed though: a clickable and
copyable link could be handled with a widget at the bottom of the page, for
instance.

------
adtac
To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow
2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference
is night and day.

You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.

~~~
MBCook
Hacker News loads very fast without AMP. Daring Fireball loads very fast
without AMP. Lots of sites do. That's up to the people making the sites to
fix.

He's the thing: I CAN'T OPT OUT. If I don't like it or don't want it my only
option is to ditch Google.

~~~
fixermark
You're not claiming the solution to the slow web is that every website should
look like HN or Daring Fireball, are you?

~~~
MBCook
No, you can do a lot more and still have it fast. But there are also a lot of
sites that have basically the same content as HN or DF and load way too slow
due to crud.

------
iainmerrick
And don't forget: at least 99% of users will be completely unaware of AMP.
They'll use it by default because lots of Google search results use AMP.

Google gets to make this happen because they own the users, and there's very
little to be done about it.

The only countermeasure I can think of is if lots of publishers were to
boycott AMP en masse. But publishers have been unable to reduce web bloat any
other way, so what would their upside be?

------
mrkgnao
Me personally, I dislike AMP but would be fine with some way to copy the
goddamned URL of the page I'm on. The way it currently stands, AMP sort of
breaks how one intuitively expects browsers to work.

------
petre
Is there a way to block AMP and load the real page instead?

~~~
ino
yes, use [https://encrypted.google.com](https://encrypted.google.com)

~~~
dandv
Or Request Desktop Site from your browser.

Or edit the URL to remove the beginning from "http" to "/amp/s".

Or View Source and go to the link in "link rel='canonical'".

------
longsangstan
Surprised to see so many people hate AMP. I understand why developer/publisher
may hate AMP because of development effort/stealing content... But as a reader
I am inclined to click the link with the lightening bolt icon and I don't
recall to see many broken page.

------
artursapek
Google should focus on making their own shit load faster instead of digging
their nails into other websites. Google Groups for example is terrible.

------
burai
We used to have RSS, a standard that allowed to read articles easily and
efficiently, and it died with the help of google when it killed google reader.
And now they have created this new "standard" in their own garden and expect
people to go and play it in exchange of better positioning. I think I'll take
the suggestion I've seen here and I'll use duckduckgo

~~~
seanp2k2
They couldn't put AdSense on RSS feeds.

------
Jazgot
I hate AMP! Please check this thread:
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/8ogdv04Cm-k/6KpwLBKkEwAJ)

~~~
seanp2k2
Hilariously, when I try to visit that on mobile, it wants me to log into my
Google account, with no way to not do that.

------
malchow
AMP was originally a more interesting project called PageSpeed that was open
to anyone running webserver(s). I helped the Goog guys work on it by dint of
having founded a premium adexchange company. It was great. AMP? Somewhat less
great.

~~~
fixermark
Actually, they're separate. PageSpeed is still here:

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

~~~
malchow
They were one and the same. AMP looked more profitable, so PageSpeed Service
was deprecated. Only the documentation remains.

~~~
dandv
No, they weren't. Apache mod-pagespeed is and has been a completely different
effort.

------
devy
From what I read, majority of the focus of page bytes reduction to optimize
fro mobile experiences is on lowering JPEG image quality (AMP Lite) and/or
fixate it to 85% for AMP.

I wonder why Google is taking a fixed reduction of image quality reduction
rather than considering a dynamic image quality reduction approach like
JPEGMini[1] and Kraken.io[2] took?

The latter ones will take visual perceptions into consideration hence they are
usually able to squeeze out more bytes savings in the end.

[1]: [https://www.jpegmini.com](https://www.jpegmini.com)

[2]: [https://kraken.io](https://kraken.io)

------
pdog
Is there a standard way to get to the original page from the AMP page? I've
ended up on too many AMP pages with no way to get to the original link.

~~~
novia
Yes, if you have the option to "Request Desktop Site" in your browser, that
will redirect you to the non-mobile site. Another way that works for me is to
remove the first "[https://www.google.com/amp/"](https://www.google.com/amp/")
from the url. This should direct you to the mobile version of the site.

------
NicoJuicy
To all people who are defending AMP with 2g arguments, i never have 2g, 3g is
the minimum. I don't like it. Make it opt-out please :)

------
techbio
No one here seems to have mentioned Google's back-end wins from cached
smaller, standardized code and images.

It's their datacenter using fewer ops on more content to do what they
initially set out to do--organize the world's information.

Normalized images associated with a reduction in front-end presentation
content can train the IRL bots orders of magnitude more quickly.

------
cekvenich3
Even w/o AMP you need to have a no javascript version for SEO.

Even w/o AMP you need to have fast downloading images.

Even w/o AMP you must use a CDN.

So don't call it AMP. Call it: "SEO optimized and for when users are not on
Wi-Fi or for huge scale/load". You can include the lighting bolt or not.

Wha, wha.

------
lawnchair_larry
Absolutely hate AMP and the inability to opt out of it.

------
pcora
Yep. Google Results are better but I switched to DDG because of AMP too.
Crappy implementation that does not let me get the URL to share a link.

~~~
cekvenich3
What is DDG?

~~~
robin_reala
[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

------
dromen
How does Google do this legally at all? Can I just download and redistribute
any and all content I find on the net, and then present it as if it's the
original?

More specifically, how do they not get sued into oblivion for copyright
infringement? They are after all redistributing content they are not licensed
to redistribute.

------
kevinSuttle
What the what? I thought AMP was designed specifically to be performant and
light?

------
beezischillin
What about announcing AMP Null, a way to disable this abomination?

