
Kill Google AMP before it kills the web - DLay
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/
======
rubyn00bie
Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better
than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single
source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result
of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content
and being able to easily link to them.

I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond
simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."

This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense
(good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and
creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.

One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's
one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a
user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-
AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate.
My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first
place.

~~~
jwilcoxson
Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty
good, and not Bing.

~~~
exergy
Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad
results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm
often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough"
and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love
Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless.

That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's
Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to
compromise on something as fundamental as search.

~~~
lucb1e
The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results
for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the
page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good
idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works
very well.

At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5
billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in
a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results
were _completely_ unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top
3 there are 2 results that answer my question.

Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the
Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than
expected.

I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites
with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50
psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode"
seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.

Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and
drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name,
surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to
google.nl.

~~~
bambax
> _At least it 's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5
> billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes
> in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three
> results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong)._

Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be
Google's undoing.

Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.

Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie
"Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a
crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' \- The
Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie).
The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.

On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all
from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask"
that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift
a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God
has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.

Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is _certain_ you're
looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.

Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a
funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a
"movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)

Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.

~~~
dTal
>crazy religious fanatic site

FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very
well known spoof site.

~~~
alanh
And a canonical example of Poe’s Law in action.

~~~
bambax
Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a
very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or
Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.

A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results
about the movie, because it's not about the movie.

------
namuol
> Google has no respect for [iOS Safari]. It’s a deliberate effort by Google
> to break the open web.

I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's
implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience
closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning:

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream](http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream)

...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_
platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors
and web developers alike.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

~~~
amelius
But also:

sheer overwhelming difficulty + no incentive = no action

------
cramforce
With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we
didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked
to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the
overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll
like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

~~~
cramforce
On top of this: we currently have a team working to fix webkit bugs that are
problematic for AMP. This, of course, will make webkit better for everyone.

~~~
ehed
Can you team also work on a way to let people opt-out of Google AMP?

------
richdougherty
In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page
that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly.

However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own
platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site.
Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.

* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page

We already had this two decades ago: WAP, its contemporaries (i-mode), and its
immediate successors (XHTML Mobile Profile).

~~~
frozenport
Except mobile Web adoption in 2002 was poor because of form factor, among
other things.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh sure. Though I'm not actually trying to criticise the idea of a subset, if
anything I'd support it. I'm just pointing to potentially useful precedent.
It's not a new idea.

------
hannob
Here's your one step recipe to kill AMP:

* Build fast webpages.

The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for
fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages
without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish
over the years.

~~~
callahad
Building fast webpages won't get you preferential placement in Google search
results.

~~~
WorkLobster
Unless I'm missing something, it does:
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-
speed-i...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-
search-ranking.html)

~~~
callahad
You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in
ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories"
carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to
organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate,
flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc.

For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only
_two_ aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page,
bested _only_ by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about
snakes in the everglades. These stories _also_ appear in the normal search
results, but not until the bottom of page 7.

So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from
Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count
the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.

~~~
WorkLobster
Ah, yeah. Truth be told I realised after hitting 'send' that you may have
meant that.

This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one
to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of
the grounds for its existence.

------
niftich
The complaint about AMP's strange UX paradigms is valid: it works very hard to
pretend like every AMP article is a standalone website, but it actually
behaves like a viewport-wrapping iframe, where Google Search is on the outside
and the article is on the inside [1]. But it's not a personal affront to iOS;
it's more of an artifact of Google's confusing market strategy and conflicting
requirements for AMP's deployment: pretend like AMP pages are real browser-
resident tabs, while actually driving traffic around within the confines of
Google Search (vs. outside) when possible. As much as I don't care for their
strategy, I respect needing to balance conflicting requirements. They should
scrap the dishonest UX and be up-front about what they are, as I write [1].

But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP
on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP
isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose
existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor
from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but
runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound.

Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential
treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving
preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way
they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant
Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened,
and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game
between two massive content aggregation portals.

Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels
about that.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625)
[2]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073)

~~~
jeffbax
Is Apple news more than a feed spec like RSS / is the content hosted by Apple
directly, like how AMP pages actually live on google.com?

~~~
tjl
Apple News is really just RSS. I think Gruber's Daring Fireball stuff in Apple
News just comes from his RSS feed. It's all hosted on your servers, so it's
basically just a specialized browser.

------
manigandham
HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it
down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to
make sites faster.

AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's
all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system
instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the
amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different
versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL
location and privacy.

Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually
served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by
Google.

~~~
pdimitar
I am on your side -- just chiming in to share my observations.

To 99% of the businesses I worked with, _software development is a singular
expense_. It's treated like buying a tractor for the farm. Hell, even farming
equipment is more generously funded by the buyers for possible future expenses
(compared to most software development) -- maintenance, repairs, parts that
periodically need replacement, fuel.

For one reason or another, most businesses treat software development like
buying a socket wrench from the local store and never even thinking of
spending another penny on the developed product in the future. They expect it
to run perfectly forever.

It's a sad state of affairs.

~~~
manigandham
That only makes AMP worse. Many publishers are already squeezed with dev
resources, the last thing they need is yet another standard to support instead
of putting that time towards the original HTML that is universally available
to all users and devices.

~~~
pdimitar
Absolutely. You know, in a perverse way of seeing at it, I kind of feel good
that Google forces AMP; they are like "Hah, you all stupid motherduckers
couldn't get your own crap together for 15 years, guess it's time for you to
be ruled, if you can't make use of your freedom". If you look at it that way,
it makes sense.

Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together
indeed. One can dream, right?

~~~
manigandham
Yes. Most often, it's a business management and priority issue than anything
technical. It's far easier for developers to point to AMP limitations and just
say "its just not supported" rather than try to argue against adding more
cruft to the page and get overruled anyway.

------
marricks
I know it might not be their shtick, but I wish the post focused more on the
"publication independence" part of the criticism. Giving Google control over
prioritizing a subset of the web, and letting them optimize for it, just gives
them a better way to filter content. They seriously have enough power over the
web as it is.

The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they
could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue.

Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant
to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively
adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.

~~~
MBCook
Gruber's first link ( that's not part of the quoted block or a link to the
article he's quoting from ) going to a previous piece of his about the
publication independence problems of going along with AMP.

------
smacktoward
The only reason AMP is even viable is because the current alternatives are
even worse.

Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that
_user experience matters._ Just about every major online publication is
painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive
design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript,
and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter
signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be
willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody
else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table.
So the economic incentive for change is not there.

AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane
market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing
demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a
death spiral, and in that situation _any_ idea that seems to offer a way out
is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP.

The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the
publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for
external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of
farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone
like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.

------
dreamcompiler
AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous
to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP
does indeed need to die in a very hot fire.

And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better
functioning search engine.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Bing works fine. The more people use them, the better they'll get. DuckDuckGo
mostly feeds off other engines, but is also good.

I personally don't really recommend StartPage because you can't get away from
Google's opinionated ranking on a site that provides Google results.

But in short, use other search engines and they'll get better. Stop giving
Google your search behavior, it's what they use to keep themselves on top.

~~~
tytso
You realize Bing supports AMP and has an AMP cache as well, right? And if you
use DDG, you're effectively using Bing.

BTW, Cloudflare has an AMP cache as well....

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I am aware Bing also supports AMP, but reducing Google's dominance in search
data is key on preventing them from determining web design going forward.

DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own
efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source
and can be contributed to.

------
Pxtl
Honestly? I've come to loathe the abysmal performance of the modern web so
much that I'm ready to accept AMP. Half the reason I come to hacker News is
that the site runs fast. And half the reason I comment before reading the
article is because it doesn't.

~~~
Houshalter
I often comment without reading the articles because on an older device it's
impossible. 90% of links will just crash the browser in 10 seconds. I can
watch an hour long youtube video just fine, but trying to load a newspaper
article will make it keel over and die.

Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I
like doing that.

~~~
qb45
There are extensions which add buttons to quickly enable/disable JS on per-
site basis like NoScript for Firefox.

Also, Firefox reader view fixes many websites which otherwise render empty
with JS disabled for reasons I didn't bother investigating.

~~~
Houshalter
I don't think it's possible to get browser extensions on an old iOS device.

~~~
qb45
Fair enough, I didn't realize you meant iOS devices.

------
tomduncalf
AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying
for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing
features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is
totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it -
if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!

~~~
mort96
Google's broken AMP crap is what made me switch to duckduckgo on iOS.

~~~
ihsw2
It seems to me that only iOS users are complaining -- as an Android user I am
blown away by how readable AMP pages are.

I can just get to the page, read it, and then leave. There's no futzing around
with:

* long scrolling down "the fold" filled with clickbait in-site links or other unrelated nonsense

* interstitial and overlay ads

* crappy non-mobile interfaces

* "Shared" buttons stickied to the bottom or top of the viewframe

There's still ads around the page (in-content ads between paragraphs and "you
may like" or "recommended" ads at the bottom of the page) and navigational
elements to browse outside of the AMP page. It's the mobile content
consumption experience as it should be.

~~~
protomyth
Yes, the people who don't own a phone OS by Google are complaining about
Google's AMP. That is part of the problem.

------
colinbartlett
If you hate AMP as much as I do, I highly recommend switching your mobile
browser to DuckDuckGo. The results are as good as Google and no AMP.

~~~
Semaphor
> The results are as good as Google and no AMP.

I use ddg myself and as much as I like it, it's still quite a bit away from
Google in quality of search results. Usually it's good enough, but I still get
result pages where ddg has nothing I want and appending !g gives me what I
want in #1

~~~
jeffbax
Same, I use DDG, but fall back to the

> !g

bang quite often when I need to really find something

------
d-sc
I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind
AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be
sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a
single article.

~~~
CaptSpify
And that's valid. The problem AMP is trying to solve is absolutely real, but
the way they are trying to solve it is shady.

------
bikamonki
AMP was born dead no need to kill it. As the webmaster of many websites, the
last time I heard customers complain about rankings in SRPs was ten years ago.
Their main concern nowadays is likes, follows and shares. I keep telling them:
put some effort on your website, own your audience, you do not _own_ your FB
page much less the fans and likes there. They don't listen. Trapped in the
hype.

In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content
(same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do
not care?

Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and
mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?

------
fenomas
What kills me about AMP's UX is that not only is it a dark pattern, it's not
even a _new_ dark pattern.

Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger
their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe
underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and
mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.

~~~
ihsw2
How is this a dark pattern? Sites opt into it, users get a streamlined
interface for content consumption, everybody wins.

The only losers in this are those seeking to "curate" the user experience (UX)
on their sites, and personally I lump them in with malicious ad peddlers -- to
hell with them.

~~~
protomyth
It is the same opt-in as mob protection: "nice search results you have there,
be a shame if something dropped you to page 2"

~~~
ihsw2
The only way that would be accurate is if Google targeted content creators
randomly for rent seeking, but the fact of the matter is Google has a vested
interest in making sure their search results are compellingly useful to users.

Personally I'm using Google search more _because_ AMP makes things faster for
me. It's a win-win for me.

------
SanPilot
I do not understand the dislike this community harbors for AMP. I personally
really enjoy the system; whenever I'm searching for any type of article on my
phone (Android), I prefer AMP pages, because they load faster and are far more
responsive than some of their more bloated counterparts.

~~~
MBCook
The fact that you say android explains everything to me. I'm sure Google made
sure it was a decent experience on their operating system. But it's clear they
didn't give two seconds thought to iOS, and haven't bothered to improve it
since it was released.

It really does make google search feel broken. Many of the top results no
longer "work right".

Ignoring all the other issues of who is in control and whether it's a walled
garden and all that other stuff… On iOS it's a terrible user experience. That
ALONE would make me hate it.

~~~
izacus
Well now you know how most of those web pages felt on Android before - web
devs tested on mobile Safari and left pages broken and utterly stuttery on
Android web browser.

~~~
foobarbazetc
That's because Chrome on Android sucked.

~~~
dragonwriter
Android Browser wasn't Chrome on Android.

------
gwu78
Long before amp, Google began prefixing search result urls with
"google.tld?url=" and adding Google parameters as suffixes such as "sa=",
"ved=", etc.

Unless I am mistaken this parasitic cruft only serves Google, not end users.

Below is quick and dirty program to filter out the above. Replace .com with
.cctld as needed.

Requirements: cc, lex

Usage:

    
    
       curl -o 1.htm https://www.google.com/search?q=xyz
       yyg < 1.htm > 2.htm
       your-ad-supported-web-browser 2.htm
    

To compile this I use something like

    
    
       flex -Crfa -8 -i g.l;
       cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yyg;
    

Save text below as file g.l Then compile as above.

    
    
       %%
       [^\12\40-\176]
       \/url[?]q= 
       "http://www.google.com/gwt\/x?hl=en&amp;u=" 
       "&amp;"[^\"]* 
       %%
       main(){yylex();}
       yywrap(){}
    

As for amp, I read that it needs to use iframes (and Javascript). Yikes. We
can easily write a program to strip out iframe targets as well as links to
Javascript.

amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes
automatically.

~~~
SomewhatLikely
It's really annoying trying to copy and paste URLs from Google results. It
also seems largely unnecessary, can't they detect clicks using javascript? I
have noticed they have started doing this with links sent through Google
Hangouts messages as well. I do remember a time when they weren't doing this
and it was very refreshing because everyone else was.

------
cbhl
Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on
mobile.

The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because
it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically
everyone).

I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their
job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their
livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality
(to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing
Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of
those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do
actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But
it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come
with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.

------
meow_mix
I'm honestly just too scared that Google would gain an even larger foothold in
the web to consider implementing AMP on any sites, but the UX argument is
valid as well

------
Antrikshy
I agree 100% with his frustration with AMP scrolling behavior on iOS.

~~~
foobarbazetc
Yup. It's like Google want everyone to experience the crappy scrolling on
Android everywhere. :)

On a more serious note it is extremely frustrating. Everything about the AMP
UX on iOS is broken.

------
sammyh
I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops.
The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages
makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is
google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that
they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery.
The truth is that for the everyday user the only interesting part is the
content. Not the ads, not the comments, especially not the page layout and
hopefully not the links to other "You never believe what X things about Y"
articles across 10 X different page loads. AMP for web articles may die as
publishers try to remain more independent or relevant in other forums
(snapchat, instagram stories, facebook live etc.) but the idea of fast and
simple mobile pages should remain.

For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast
google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive
users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force
developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.

~~~
eponeponepon
> How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines
> so that they fit through your mailbox?

That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds
of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby
commercial reasons?

~~~
sammyh
Freedom would be to choose whether format you like. Web is anything but that
as every developer and user has to rely on set of rules and software to be
able to communicate and access it. In practice most of us have zero power on
the system itself. Someone else (businesses and organizations funded by
businesses, developers working in such organizations) have the power to
control how the web works. At the moment google yields much of the such power
as does facebook, amazon, twitter, apple and others. Truthfully I see the
whole internet today as a business enterprise that as a side effect allows
everyone to share their everything. Internet as we know it will never be free
and thats probably part of the reason why there has been a movement to "fix
the internet" ([https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-
creat...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-
looks-to-reinvent-it.html?_r=0))

Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an
attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use
and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly
understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the
content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical
one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else
to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they
think you want.

The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially
in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the
government than in any other place in the world.

------
theclaw
Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail"
and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in
that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling.

This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out
of it.

~~~
MBCook
Too little for me. I still can't easily copy that URL, and there's no way to
opt out of it. Instead of fixing their complete break to the way with the web
works, they put in a little tiny patch and clean it's just as good.

~~~
theclaw
If you're on iOS You can copy it by long-touching the URL that pops up when
you touch the link icon.

~~~
MBCook
You can now (although that's still different from any other site). I'm pretty
sure that was only added a few months ago and when it was first released you
couldn't easily copy the URL.

------
evolve2k
"it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the
status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view"

Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss
bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?

~~~
tlrobinson
Double tap. I think it only works with one tap if the address bar is already
open.

~~~
MBCook
No, it's a single tap on the status bar (where the clock is). It works almost
anywhere in iOS there's a long scrolling thing.

~~~
tlrobinson
No, in Mobile Safari if the address bar isn't visible you have to tap twice,
once to show the address bar and once to scroll to the top.

It is a single tap in most other apps though.

~~~
MBCook
Oh, ok, I get you now.

------
0003
So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also
more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering
their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that
hate it.

~~~
MBCook
Have you been to Daring Fireball? It's one of the fastest loading pages on the
whole Internet because it's not crapped up with lots of stuff. Gruber's site
is proof you don't need AMP to have fast loads.

I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there
articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw
steep declines in revenue?

~~~
__derek__
> how exactly are AMP pages monetized?

AMP has an ad component.[1] It seems to have gotten a lot of ad network
participation now, but it was pretty limited (i.e. effectively no money via
AMP views) last year when I was working for a major content publisher. It's
undoubtable that the company lost a lot of ad revenue in exchange for
protecting its position in Google search results.

[1]:
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions/amp-
ad/amp-ad.md)

~~~
MBCook
Thanks

------
smagch
I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers
could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I
even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with
advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media
companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume
AMP.

Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for
potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor
performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX.
AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user
experience and news distribution.

AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a
technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands:
everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a
valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be
profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good,
but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is
no good.

------
MichaelBurge
> Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for
> it, yes a JavaScript file from Google.

What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it
transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and
send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce
the slowdown and privacy issues?

It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided
Javascript file, which provides common UI components:

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec)

"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow
author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements
to reach its performance goals."

Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button
requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about
using anything that leads me into a corner like that.

------
thro1111111
Jokes on google, AMP sites always crash on my old iphone 4s (the one I use for
mindless browsing), so I just avoid AMP content

------
fghafoor
As a web developer I have AMP but as a user I love it! Websites have been so
bloated that something like this was badly needed.

People loading just 100-200 kbs of fonts to serve 10kb of original content.

~~~
omgtehlion
Okay, I know of a website that loads almost 2MB of javascript to show you 140
bytes of actual content.

------
Sephr
I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with
an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN.

If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL
structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more
developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.

------
thr0waway1239
I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any
genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore.

"Oh, we _open source_ it, you know", seems the common answer.

If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and
there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because
it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just
accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and
wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in
the initiative.

Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the
giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire
tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent
example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly
compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source
is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for
extending oligopolies.

There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a
competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a
counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every
realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a
genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and
put them out of business.

But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical
innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition
and decentralization of the web, probably not.

------
golergka
It took 8 seconds, 1.7 Mb of data and 233 requests to load this article. May
be a web like this deserves to be killed.

------
dshep
Is this why Google News on mobile is so terrible? Feels like using an android
news app inside of Safari. Thumbs down.

------
pjbrunet
I suspect whoever made that executive decision at Google to use "AMP" was too
young to remember Frontpage and so many years fighting with MSIE. How soon we
forget. AMP is bad news. Keep your hands off my design. It's not your
Internet, Google. PS: I'm on Linux, not an Apple fanboy :-D

------
J5892
On our site, we just load AMP as a base experience, and load our other stuff
on top of it if it's not served in the AMP browser. So we get the initial
render speed of AMP, along with the SEO advantages, and can still implement
features not supported by AMP for the majority of our users.

------
xbmcuser
The problem he is seeing is with safari rendering rather than amp itself. He
should ask Apple to fix that.

------
skybrian
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

Is anyone working on a competing standard?

~~~
MBCook
It's called HTML, and it's been around for a number of years.

If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads…
you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be.

This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or
even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies.
The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who
doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.

~~~
skybrian
You're missing the point. Once you've clicked on the link, it's too late.
Putting an icon on the link that says "this isn't one of those bloated pages"
seems useful, particularly for people on slow connections.

In theory, someone else could create another standard and write browser
extensions to put an icon on links that meet that standard.

The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.

~~~
MBCook
In Safari I've gotten the sense (don't know if it's true) it pauses the
connections when I go into reader mode for JS and such.

> The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.

True. But it also doesn't CAUSE it which some people almost seem to be arguing
from, as if fat HTML pages are a fait-accompli.

------
limeblack
I'm not sure when there is going to end up but because google amp is hosted on
google servers you can actually read such articles on GoGo plane flights with
out paying for Internet. It was kinda nice although I'm not sure how long
until this will be fixed.

------
merraksh
Original Register link:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks! We updated the link from
[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-
amp](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp).

------
hornetblack
> it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the
> status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view

Is that what was happening. It just felt like scroll was spazzing out. Usually
I was just trying to push a button near the top of the screen.

------
grizzles
A competing decentralized implementation if anyone is keen to pitch in:
[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534)

------
relics443
As a user, I love AMP. Pages load fast, and that's about all I really care
about.

I don't really do web dev anymore, but if I was I think I'd be happy about
using it.

Maybe a content creator feels differently but I don't have any experience with
that.

------
Aissen
News websites dug their own graves. AMP is a solution to a simple problem: the
inability for websites to reach acceptable perf levels. For users, AMP is a
blessing. It even improves the ad situation a bit (no more perf impact).

------
twsted
Yes, of course. Just as we are killing publishing on Facebook, right?

------
martin1975
When does that bloody pagerank patent expire anyway? Maybe we can see slightly
better quality on other major search engines if they used the same algorithm
Google "invented"

------
taurath
Google news has a bug on iOS safari for me that makes it just load the header
- it's actually cut back a lot on my idle news consumption - please don't fix!

------
WhiteSource1
From the publisher side does anyone have data on AMP's impact on search
rankings (to the original publisher - not Google :-))

------
Animats
There are worse things than AMP. "Wix" sites, for one. 20 seconds to load a
page where all the useful info is static.

------
bozonil
Do you remember the time when slow webpages with megabytes of ads in
popups/iframes were killing the web? When almost every webpage was trying to
get you install their half-baked mobile apps?

AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have
to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.

------
2_listerine_pls
Can someone explain How is this killing the open web? Isn't this an open
standard?

~~~
ninkendo
It's not the standard, it's what google does to amp sites: re-hosts them on
their own site so your site is now (essentially) google.com/yoursite.com.

AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors,
ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but
google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even
more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better
analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do
on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search
results).

The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's
aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of
dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP,
while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any
non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or
lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online,
widening their competitive moat, etc.

It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of
AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.

~~~
ihsw2
But it's entirely opt-in -- how is this controversial?

~~~
ninkendo
Because users seeing AMP links as faster will pressure more sites to do it.

Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using
bloated javascript, they're fast because:

\- The JS that _is_ used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites

\- You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to
establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc

\- Google's servers/networking/etc stack is very fast, faster than what is in
reach of most sites

\- The new content is loaded into the existing DOM of the search page, which
can be much faster

And probably the most damning:

\- Google will eagerly-load the contents of the first few results, making them
not just fast but 100% instant.

What choice do sites have?

~~~
ihsw2
> What choice do sites have?

Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is
available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef
tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better.

What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant
Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't
even nearly as impossibly mind-boggling.

AMP is an _open standard_ that _any publisher_ and _any search engine_ can
implement and if all search engines get on board then users win so much --
pages load faster, they require much less network bandwidth, they're easier to
read. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will have sympathy for publishers after all
the bullshit we're being forced to experience both now and historically.

~~~
ninkendo
If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we
have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and
I don't.

~~~
ihsw2
My argument is Google took an alternative road here, like they did with SPDY
and HTTP/2 development -- they developed an open standard and threw their
weight behind it. I don't see how AMP is a walled garden since any and all
other search engines are free to implement the standard as well. Content
aggregators like HN can cache and serve up AMP pages as well.

The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached
and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue
because publishers are opting into this system.

------
zghst
Man, business is hard. Millions of voices, easy to die by a thousand of cuts.

------
urda
This, coupled with the common anthem from the tech crowd of using Chrome _and_
only Chrome is a dangerous precedent.

Stop supporting AMP, and use something other than Google Search and Chrome
_today_.

------
kazinator
Are they serious with the following?

AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character:

    
    
      <html >
           ^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo.
    

Just, no, Google. You're not Ken fucking Iverson, and this is not APL. Just
supporting one way of doing it, <html amp>, is perfectly fine.

~~~
emmelaich
I suppose they do this because some html processors do stupid things with
`amp` - because it might be part of the ampersand html entity.

------
cbsmith
I gotta say, this mostly seems like an attack on the implementation of AMP in
Safari than it is on AMP itself.

------
consultSKI
Love my duckduckgo

------
kuon
What is AMP? EDIT: I mean technically, not what the acronym means.

~~~
ihsw2
Per the specification:

> AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news
> articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance
> characteristics.

Source:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec)

Basically you have your website serve up your content within a subset of HTML
so that your pages _have_ to load faster. JavaScript is permitted but with
limited functionality (again, the intent is your website loads quickly).

Also, Google will host _your webpage_ on their servers after crawling your
website. When a user clicks on an _AMP_ link from Google's search results, the
content will be served up from Google's servers and thus the page will load
much faster.

------
randyrand
talk about being over-dramatic

------
notgood
"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things
for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single
company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does
newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software
publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't
even mention it.

That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company
gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that
can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as
long as it is "convenient" for most people.

~~~
blinkingled
Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits
Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own
scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed
platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile
Safari would refuse to render AMP pages."

You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he
ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own
scrolling on iOS.

~~~
MBCook
AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and
ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.

I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something
breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.

Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions
that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the
top of the article to jump back to the top.

I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly
infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search
results.

Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a
number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO
OPTION to turn it off.

I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version
of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.

~~~
dyarosla
I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for
browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the
top behavior.

~~~
MBCook
It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere.

iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them
are ever _explained_. You just have to stumble across it or read about it
somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.

Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or
right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make
features more visible because it seems many people, including power users,
weren't even aware that gesture existed.

Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I
forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and
it's totally hidden.

~~~
tedmiston
Another nice gesture that's lesser known is hold down on the left side of the
screen in any app then drag to the right to open the app switcher.

~~~
MBCook
That's one of the new force press gestures that came around in the 6S. It
really is useful, but I'm having trouble getting over almost 10 years of
muscle memory that no such gesture existed.

Plus it's a bit fiddly.

------
winteriscoming
What's going to be interesting is if browsers can at some point render a APM
version of a page natively. What I mean is render the original page on the
source website as APM content. That will stop the monopoly and hijacking (or
rather the rationalization of it) of target websites in Google results.

~~~
winteriscoming
Or as a start, maybe a browser extension/plugin where it renders it for
certain configured sites.

------
tambourine_man
Original link was submitted, flagged (why?) and vouched for. Tried to submit
again and, instead of up voting the previous one, it got resubmitted.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we updated the link of this submission to the original from
[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-
amp](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp).

The previous submission was older than the threshold to be considered a
duplicate, which is why it went through on its own.

------
alphagrowth
Hate it or love it if you are a content producer and want to compete in SEO
you have to AMP.

------
wcr3
i agree that AMP is troubling for a variety of reasons - none of which,
however, change the fact that the author of this article is unquestionably a
Weenie.

------
wastedbrains
agreed

------
pducks32
I honestly would support Apple or Mozilla from refusing to render AMP pages. I
use DuckDuckGo on Safari so don't have to deal with it thankfully.

~~~
SquareWheel
AMP is built on open HTML5 standards. What you're suggesting is that Apple and
Mozilla intentionally stop supporting the open web.

------
wanda
A little late to the party.

People have been criticising AMP for all of the reasons mentioned in this
pointless article for many months prior.

~~~
MBCook
Yep. I think he's written about it before too. The first thing in the article
that's not a quote is a link to one of his previous articles.

But he has a link blog, he saw a article he wanted to share, and he added his
thoughts as he always does.

And if people listen this time now that we've all had experience of AMP being
around for a while ? Sounds good to me.

