
We're Bullish on AMP - bergie
https://trackchanges.postlight.com/were-bullish-on-amp-abfc6e1f10a1
======
barrkel
I thought AMP was an anti-ad-blocking play. It smells to me like Google is
trying to use its dominant position in search to reduce consumer control of
the browser; it's a risky road to go down for everyone, including Google.

For me, as long as I disable javascript, the modern mobile web is plenty fast
enough. That is, the bits of the web I want to use on the move: mostly text,
occasional pictures. It takes real effort to break this with javascript
disabled. Most JS on e.g. news sites, blogs, aggregators etc. is tracking and
ad related, dynamically adding links to viral content, all that stuff you
don't need and dramatically slows down sites through repeated reflow.

~~~
chatmasta
Yep, this was also incredibly obvious to me when google introduced it. It's
such a typical Google move to market something as "better for the web" when
what they really mean is "better for our pockets."

Fortunately for anyone with Apple phones, content blockers should still work
on AMP pages.

~~~
sanderjd
Won't things like AdBlock still work on AMP pages? Do people outside the HN
bubble turn off javascript to block ads (or for any other reason)?

~~~
notatoad
i've seen this assumption made just about every time AMP is mentioned, that
it's somehow about preventing adblock. AMP _requires_ that all your ads are
specifically tagged as ads, and that no javascript is modifying the page after
it has loaded. Instead of making adblocking more difficult, it seems to be
going out of its way to make adblocking easier to do and more difficult for
publishers to prevent.

------
lllr_finger
Working at a media conglomerate I probably have a different take than some - I
love AMP, compared to the alternatives. For personal sites I don't see it as a
big deal, but for news sites it's amazing.

The devs working on news sites understand the current state of bloated pages
is bad and are eager to create fast, sexy pages. Unfortunately there are
entities such as BizDev and AdOps that want to add more stuff to the pages to
make more money, and it's easier to quantify ROI for a new ad placement
compared to shaving 100ms off page load times. So we end up with dozens of
scripts and script loaders and all sorts of other things. Editors and product
managers want responsive pages with ad placements and enhanced functionality.

Along comes AMP, and all of the above are freaking out at the loss of control
while I'm gleefully looking at super fast loading times and pages that still
have most of the important functionality and ads.

Yes, the script size is large, but it will be cached amongst all AMP pages and
it's refreshing to not have to think about implementing responsive pages, lazy
loading, etc. because AMP handles all that.

~~~
untog
I have a different media take. Any attempt at making something other than a
text article with a photo slideshow attached now carries an SEO penalty. I
think that's a shame - not that every article should be some crazy one off
creation, but in an industry that desperately needs to innovate and provide
value to readers, closing off that many doors strikes me as dangerous.

~~~
shostack
You forgot high CPM auto play video ads.

------
anilgulecha
AMP would be commendable if it came about as a open standard, and won in the
marketplace.

But it's come out controlled by the major search engine, that will promote and
highlight pages in it's search rankings if you adhere to their new "open"
standard.

It may still be good, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain
features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to
be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best
practices guide than anything else.

~~~
anilgulecha
I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP
standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking
algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is
already fast on its own.

~~~
anilgulecha
Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist.
The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.

~~~
anilgulecha
These carrots drive ad dollars, hence my distaste to calling this a "open
standard".

As an example, w3c got together to say solid HTTPS websites get a green color
in the URL bar. Banks, etc get a higher, more highlighted green color for a
special class of certificates. These are open standards that everyone agreed
on.

I hope this makes it more clear why AMP is not a open standard.

------
ungzd
Google reinvented WAP/WML in 2016 because cancerous news sites gone mad with
javascript. Cool hack. Waiting for return of ringtones and pagers.

~~~
bbcbasic
And tiny phones as a status symbol. And making sure you are the same network
as your mates to call them for free after 6pm and at the weekends. Those were
the days.

------
squeaky-clean
Has anyone else noticed how Google is using AMP to provide content for
searches without you ever leaving google.com? Here's an example of a quick
search I did for "Sausage Party review" [0]. You can quickly flip through AMP
articles by comicbook.com, USAToday, and others while clearly staying within
Google.

It seems to me like they're trying this a lot lately, Structured Data is the
other example that comes to mind. Creating "web standards", that are supposed
to help a website, but are really most helpful to Google and their crawler.
Then giving an SEO boost to anyone who uses those standards. And then once
enough people are using those standards, just display the relevant parts of
the results directly on google.com

I get that it being hosted on Google allows the servers to respond more
quickly, but do you think news websites that added these features with the
promise of better performance and an SEO boost were aware their articles would
be one thumb-swipe away from a competitor's articles?

[0] [http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ](http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ)

~~~
jayd16
Of all the conspiracy theories in this thread, I think "make easily crawlable
pages popular again" is the most realistic.

------
K0nserv
I'm not convinced of AMP. I've written before on HN about my own webpage[0]
were the average page weighs in at around ~10kb. At one point I was working on
integrating AMP and some of the constraints from AMP has made it into the
site. Ultimately though the 170kb weight of AMP(17x my average page) is a no
go. I think imposing the same constraint AMP imposes on you without actually
using their JS is a good idea if you aren't after the special treatment from
google. Another downside of AMP is that it just display a completely blank
page if the user doesn't have JS enable or blocks 3rd-party JS.

0: [https://hugotunius.se](https://hugotunius.se)

~~~
esrauch
If your pages are 10kb then I think you aren't the target audience for amp.
They say themselves that amp pages will never be the most light weight of all
pages and never faster then perfectly hand tuned pages, just way way better
than the current median website that loads MBs from 75 domains and relayouts
50 times before it's done loading.

~~~
K0nserv
You have a good point all though I'd like to put forth the argument that many
websites could just as well focus on reducing their page sizes and external
resources instead of/before adopting AMP.

~~~
esrauch
As an outsider (not remotely in any position to use amp or not) it looks like
one of the positive aspects of amp is a utility with some associated carrot
and stick to just get publishers to realize those things really are bad and
need to be taken seriously.

------
ryanmaynard
I recently setup a simple Jekyll blog that conforms to amp[1]. I used
Amplify[2], a repo that was on Show HN[3] a few months ago.

There are still a few issues with their docs at this point, but its basically
just inline css/js.

[1] [http://ryanmaynard.co/](http://ryanmaynard.co/) [2]
[https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify](https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify) [3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540)

~~~
rikkus
I loaded this on a 4g connection and it took 14 seconds from click to progress
bar disappearing. AMP talks about sub second load times on mobile. What might
be in the way of that being realised?

~~~
6DM
I just opened the site in chrome and did a hard refresh on the Good 2G setting
of the chrome tools, only took 3 seconds. Maybe you're cell phone dropped the
connection or something.

~~~
kuschku
It takes about 12 seconds on a 64k connection (the default if you used up your
data cap).

In contrast, HN loads in half a second on that connection.

Obvious result: AMP is bloated.

~~~
ryanmaynard
I don't think its AMP. I think its my fault. Out of the box, you can't place
analytics on the page. There is a special tag for any analytics. It seems I'm
getting an error, and so Google has not cached it. Thank you for telling me. I
need to debug that.

That being said, I just received 239 ms with Pingdom.[1]

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png](http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png)

~~~
kuschku
Well, cache doesn’t matter when the page is almost a quarter megabyte, but you
have only a 64kib connection.

The majority of time spent will be on getting the 170kiB AMP lib.

------
imaginenore
I still don't get AMP. It's a different markup. Am I supposed to detect mobile
devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS?
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the responsive design that we've been
fighting for? And why is it for mobile only? If it's so fast, why not make it
general purpose?

~~~
_wmd
Google are very good at pumping out "standards" that fill short term
commercial goals while in the meantime making a fragmented pig's breakfast of
the rest of the web. Aside from HTML 5 (which I'm coming to accept was
justifiably hostile to the W3 process), I have yet to see anything from Quic,
SPDY, WebSockets, and now AMP that demonstrates any kind of long term
thinking.

WebSockets for a long time (is it still true?) could not run over a SPDY/HTTP
2 connection. SPDY itself had multiple fundamentally incompatible versions in
the wild before things settled down (they changed how negotiation was
implemented), WebSockets and SPDY duplicate many of the same concepts (yes,
really), Quic seems utterly ignorant of the early history of the Internet and
the importance of flow control, and now AMP.

AMP it seems to me, is a standard designed around the current era shortcomings
in the implementation of Google Chrome (and similar browsers). It's hard to
get more myopic than that.

------
Yhippa
> the bad one, in a suit and wingtips, that jets from office to office and
> shuts down Google Reader

Ouch, that hit a nerve. Too early in the day, man.

I've seen more AMP pages on the web than I have the Facebook version of it for
what it's worth. The article went in to detail about how the pages were
designated as an AMP. it seems somewhat elegant. It's opt-in but there's
definitely an advantage to adding the mark-up to your page.

------
sametmax
AMP = the page you should have created originally without bulk, light, fast
and readable. But you didn't, and now you have 2 pages to maintain.

------
chinathrow
"The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering
all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves
page performance automatically. When using the Google AMP Cache, the document,
all JS files and all images load from the same origin that is using HTTP 2.0
for maximum efficiency."

So the proxy learns all about my traffic patterns, usage stats and userbase.

It looks like you can't opt-out of this feature or at least I couldn't find
it.

------
falcolas
I like this write up, but it raised a question for me: if Google is serving
amp pages directly, how quickly will updates to your page get reflected in
Google's cache?

Hardening back to "only two hard problems in programming" and all that.

~~~
tantalor
"We're currently working on a programmatic solution for invalidation. We
respect max-age headers for deciding when to refetch a page, but will keep
serving the last known version until we have done so."

[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901)

------
darkhorn
I don't understand why should I put a JavaScript (AMP) file to my web pages
while it doesn't have any JavaScript file.

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chinathrow
From the how-to:

"Contain a <script async
src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>)
tag as the last element in their head (this includes and loads the AMP JS
library)."

This is the big no go for me here - why would I need an AMP library, hosted on
a third party domain I have no control watsoever. They can inject what they
like, track initial script load etc.

The same goes on if you want to include further content such as tweets etc.

What do other folks think about these requirements?

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JustUhThought
I love the markets, but would be happy to never see market terms like
"bullish" on HN.

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pjmlp
With Web = HTML + CSS - JavaScript we don't need AMP.

