
Google Announces Plan to Improve URLs for AMP Pages, but AMP Will Still Suck - tambourine_man
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/01/09/amp-will-still-suck
======
refulgentis
The premise Google is responsible for the issues he mentions is demonstrably
false.

AMP's foundational tenents don't include Google Search is the one and only
search engine. Bing and Microsoft's apps have been using AMP publicly for 1.5
years, with Google's help and support during development.

The comments after are Apple bugs, not issues with Google or AMP. To wit, the
AMP foundation hired an open source consultancy 6 months to bring WebKit's
frame implementation in sync with modern browsers, which also fixes the
scrolling issues. See [http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-igalia-working-
together-to-i...](http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-igalia-working-together-to-
improve-the-web-platform.html)

~~~
spinningarrow
But is it necessary to do it using iframes? Why not open a web page (which
would be better supported in general and wouldn’t require fixes in the first
place)?

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marcell
On the one hand, I cry every time the open web loses a bit, and certainly AMP
is a loss for the open web. After all Google is essentially trying to make the
web its platform.

But as a user... I love, yes love AMP. All of these complaints about scrolling
and Safari chrome and URLs are valid, but guess what: AMP has an awesome
feature that the page actually loads!

I know some sites (like Daringfireball) load really nice and fast on mobile,
and only have 1 or 2 ads on them, but that's not the state of the web. There
are lots of sites with great content, but also 2MB of React
Frameworks/Ads/Crap to display a 2KB article. I hit "Reader Mode" as soon as I
can on these pages, which is usually after 5-10 seconds of load. Compare this
to AMP which load in <1 second. That tradeoff is worth it to me.

~~~
cageface
Yeah this is the problem. I think some of the criticisms of AMP are valid but
the sad reality is that sites are never going to clean up their act on their
own. AMP dramatically improves web UX for people that might otherwise be
inclined to give up and spend all their time in feeds in native apps.

Hopefully Google can address some of these concerns without losing the very
real end user benefits of AMP as it's implemented now.

------
wyck
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Google's new motto perhaps.

~~~
SheinhardtWigCo
Good intentions?

Strip away the blue sky projects and the stuff they do for optics/PR, and
you’re left with a machine that is designed to collect deeply personal
insights about every economic participant on Earth and use that intelligence
to make money.

Google’s road to hell was paved with deceit.

~~~
mathw
Not sure where the deceit was. This was always what they were doing.

~~~
westmeal
But before all they had was a search engine instead of 500 services paired
with analytics.

------
fictionfuture
AMP as a "feature" is really just there to prevent you from leaving search
results and google's sites.

It's a cover up for further closing down the open web and helping them bump ad
revenue.

Hopefully you guy already know that.

~~~
peterwwillis
I'm pretty sure everyone realizes what proxying all non-Google content through
their servers does. The thing is, people who rely on Google are more afraid of
it going away than they are upset at the lengths by which Google asserts
itself over their life.

It's really funny to me. They already had Android Chrome's "traffic optimizer"
to tunnel all traffic through their servers. But I guess they wanted Safari
and other mobile content as well, so they made this crappy web proxy, and now
it affects everyone's use of the web. Like... they really didn't have to do
this. But they knew they could, and knew it would only provide a minor
annoyance to most people, so they did it. And predictably, people defend it,
as if reinventing WAP were a good idea.

(To be fair: when I used a J2ME phone, I wrote WAP web services. But I'm not
runnning a J2ME phone any more.)

------
mezzode
I'm still kind of confused as to why people dislike AMP. I thought it was just
meant to be a fast subset of HTML, which allows for small, fast, cacheable
pages?

~~~
inimino
It's not a subset of HTML, it's a system of delivering content that happens to
shift some control from producers to Google.

Producers had disregarded users' interests for too long with increasingly
bloated pages. Google was able to benefit both itself and users by cutting the
bloat, but because the solution comes at the cost of further centralization,
it's seen as part of the general erosion of the open and decentralized web.

~~~
mezzode
AMP content is still hosted by the producers though isn't it?

If people are concerned by it being "centralised" due to Google caching the
pages, shouldn't they also be concerned about CDNs like Akamai? Or am I
missing something important?

~~~
franga2000
The problem is, that you never leave Google's domain. Even if the content is
hosted somewhere else, you are accessing it through an iframe on a Google
domain. But without looking at the URL bar, you don't even know it, as there
is no Google logo or anything. Not to mention, that it's a terrible user
experience. The AMP header takes up a big part of your screen height and often
causes browser URL bars not to hide, taking up even more. Add the site header
and you barely have any space left for the content. And it's even worse on old
devices - they have to render the Google page and the iframe inside it. This
makes them much slower than if Google just let you access the page directly.

~~~
mezzode
I'm not sure that being hosted on Google's domain is inherently a bad thing,
given the ubiquity of CDNs, but the others are definitely fair points. If I'm
understanding everything, AMP still seems like a good idea, it's just
implementation details which can be problematic.

------
evolighting
I think the problem for mobile web would never be solved by "import"
something.Every website should really find their own way, since websites
varies in many aspect.

But to be honest, I really think developers these days are doing things
wrong.they are adding more and more stuff for simplicity, which turn out to be
bigger troubles

