I would urge people to tell Matt Mullenweg and core WordPress developers that they don't want AMP in WordPress core. Since WordPress runs on >30% of the web, if WP adopts it, it will make the choice for most of the web that websites must shape themselves in the way Google wants it. Google is currently doing a stellar job penetrating WordPress and using its increasing influence to support its own business interests.
Well. You can’t prerender a BGP announcement at your ISPs border. So your locally cached prerendered version on -insert some random ISP here- will always be slower than google in 99% of the cases.
Been competing against google since 2005, I’ve seen a thing or two.
For sure you're not going to be faster than google. But if you're site is > 3x slower than AMP, people will notice and prefer AMP. The point is to stay competitive.
Reduce the demand for it. Include easily accessible "article only" mode, make your site friendly to current Reader Modes for all major browsers. No obtrusive ads, no 500 trackers bogging down the browser. Quick loading. Just give us the info we need, nothing more.
Just like ad blockers were a response to websites not respecting people's attention and safety, likewise AMP is a response to them not respecting people's time.
All of that would be awesome, but it won't kill AMP.
AMP isn't popular because users love it. It's popular because Google shows AMP-only results for the first screen (often two or more screens) of search results on their site. You can make as beautiful an experience as you want, but users won't see it when they search, so they won't ever get to experience it.
I don't think these issues are mutually exclusive.
Users search for news/article content with Google because the experience is qualitatively better than many of the alternatives. If there was a news website that showed trending and search-based results (and there are several), the presentation of the article after SERP clickthru would still need to be comparable.
Facebook did a more AMP-like thing of migrating the article content onto Facebook, providing the least offensive (if you are already using Facebook) presentation.
News websites in 2019 almost all auto-play video upon load and many times the video is unrelated to the article content. They load clickbait partner links in the footer. They still have dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons sprinkled on every page. I can't reliably trust my ad blockers and tracking beacon blockers or Reader Mode to work all of the time.
As much as I would like competition with Google+AMP and Facebook+articles, the current state of the web is gross and these two clean it up a little.
I haven't seen an AMP page in over 2 years, and I use Google search a lot. Anytime I saw one I clicked away in disgust, so maybe they're filtered for me.
The problem is all the people and big websites that don't seem to care at all about their own content pushing amp as some sort of great solution for website speed. Sad, but it seems to have died down.
Oh yeah, I don't read the news. If anything is important enough, I'll visit the Reddit live thread, or if it's not time sensitive, it will be in the news 2-3 weeks later, at which point it's probably worth reading.
So major news outlets are still on the AMP bandwagon? And they complain about revenue...
> If anything is important enough, I'll visit the Reddit live thread
Reddit uses AMP. If you search via Google for a Reddit thread, you'll get an AMP link. I sometimes see Redditors posting AMP links to other Reddit threads, presumably because Google search is more effective than Reddit's own search.
> or if it's not time sensitive, it will be in the news 2-3 weeks later, at which point it's probably worth reading
Google shows AMP for all search results, not just the current-news carousel. If I search for 'Sandy Hook shooting' on my phone, I see a Wikipedia onebox, the first search result which is Wikipedia (no AMP), a handful of news articles from the last few weeks, and then the remainder of the actual search results: a Business Insider article from December 2018 (AMP), an ABC article from 2014 (AMP), a Reuters article from a few weeks ago (AMP), an NBC article from a few weeks ago (AMP), a CBS News article from 2017 (AMP), a Britannica article (no AMP), and two YouTube videos (no AMP).
I tried your example and I'm not seeing AMP links on Firefox nor Chrome for Mac. Either I've changed a preference somewhere or UBlock Origin is bypassing them.
In particular, in Chrome for Mac, if you go to developer tools and enable mobile emulation (click the second icon at the top left of the developer tools window), then go to google.com and do a search for a current news topic, you'll see AMP results in your desktop browser.
I use Safari pretty much exclusively on both macOS and iOS and I saw my first amp page a couple of months ago. My first thought was oh there’s something different about this page followed by the realisation that it’s my first amp page.
Since then I’ve only seen two more. All three time I’ve clicked away almost immediately.
I think the reason I don’t see them much is because I don’t use google for search often, and I never use google news.
Does anyone around here actually know how to make sites friendly to iOS safari reader mode? Last I checked, it wasn't documented, and the best wisdom floating around was something like "use divs and maybe an article tag or two"
> likewise AMP is a response to them not respecting people's time.
I really don't think this is the reason Google had spent millions on making this.
A more realistic explanation is tvis situation gave someone the idea and management accepted it as it would give them yet another way to corner the market.
Oh, and for the love of g-d, unless your page really needs JS (as in, it's an interactive editor or something), please make it usable with JS switched off.
There's a real Stockholm syndrome prevalent here. Is the request so unreasonable?
And it's even worse. I browse with NoScript, no JS by default. Often I'm presented with a blank web page. I simply do View -> Page Style -> No Style in Firefox and usually I get a perfectly readable page.
Which means that countless sites go out of their way to be hostile to people not using JS. That's now acceptable?
Maybe stop using google and other search engines that prioritize AMP in the results. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and don’t miss google at all.
I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow, and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this site.”
Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel.
I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.
I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.
That seems like a good approach until you consider that you don’t know whether the results are unsatisfactory if you aren’t looking at both sets of results on each search. You can’t see what you don’t look at and you can’t know what you don’t know. Google may have a better result for you, but how would you know unless you search both engines?
“Unsatisfactory” is an opinion-based comparison. If you find something that satisfies your desire, it’s satisfactory. I’d say your argument is more based on whether the results are more accurate, or “better” in some more concrete way.
Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it
I JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago.
I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019
I was doing g! at work for tech searches so often I switched back. I gave it several months of effort. One example, I was googling an AWS service related question and the front page was blogs and garbage. g! had the official docs at the relevant part as the first result.
This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.
I've has the same experience; firefox has been comparable to chrome in functionality but ddg is just awful compared to google. Maybe it'll get better as time goes on...
Funnily enough, I've been using DDG for a few years and results have definitively improved to the point I'm using less and less !g
And when I do use !g results (especially tech related) are not that good ! Maybe because Google have not enough info to set me in the correct "bubble" ?
One problem I wish Google would solve is this. When I'm looking to solve a problem I've found that tons of first page results are dated but years. Adobe cc for example, they are churning updates, lots of people are having the same issues once I actually go to Adobe but the results are sometimes a decade old!
Biggest problem in your problem is Adobe. It's an utter nightmare to keep up with the constant UI changes - I really wish they'd invest more time in fixing crashes than moving shit around.
If anyone here is at Adobe, please for the love of god hammer it into the heads of your PMs to do three or four sprints dedicated only to resolving bugs and crashes.
Just to be clear (since downvotes and replies suggest I wasn't) my point is that if you're using a technology where anything written two years ago is out of date and now useless information, maybe instead of using a search engine that shows newer information you should rather prefer to use technologies where ten-year-old information is still relevant. I'm pretty sure anything I read about TeX today is going to continue to be useful information ten years from now. Not so much anything I read about Kubernetes or the non-relational database du jour. (Which is why I prefer not needing to read about those things ever.)
This is what I do and I love it. In order to avoid the AMP experience I had to stop using google web search, and it turned out that I can't tell the difference in results anyway.
Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.
Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web.
I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.
Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites.
I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything.
Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains.
The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search.
If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.
At the moment I use DDG for search, Firefox, privacy badger extension and a good vpn as well as keeping a separate browser for facebook or google sites. I switched from android to ios because I preferred Apple’s stance on privacy.
There is lots more that could be done but small, incremental changes do add up over time.
I’ve been really impressed with DDG. When I initially made the switch about a year ago and found local (New Zealand) searches were a bit crap. Then i discovered the bangs feature. If the search is crap throw a “!g” in but I’ve been doing that a lot less lately.
I mainly use DDG, but whenever I have to go to !g, I find I get better results if I phrase it like a brain damaged lunatic who can't spell and didn't start thinking about the query until two words in. I believe it keeps Google happy, if you throw it a little bone by letting it second-guess your query. Make it feel all smart and artificially intelligent, so it gives you the good results.
Anecdata: people are spoiled with google. Context-aware search queries are rampant in younger folks.
Older G users also rely on it but to a lesser extent. Having a couple weeks of appending !g when a search query does not match eventually hits the spot where "hey, they actually don't know what I'm thinking now".
When using DDG a couple of years back, I noticed that after a while, throwing in a !g became my default so I figured I might as well switch back to Google. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love DDG but for my searches, I would simply have to revert to Google too often.
I think by using DDG you will feed data to DDG thus improving DDG. A huge advantage that Google has over DDG is huge enormous userbase that constantly feed data to Google thus making it better compared to other search engine. CMIIW.
This comment and a lot of its children are about DDG vs. Google. But that's not this point.
That some techies avoid Google, won't kill AMP. That does not mean I am against it, I use DDG as default engine and fall back to Google only if I tried different queries and scrolled down and still can't find it, and I recommend DDG to everyone. But this question is about killing AMP, which this won't significantly help towards unless we can get non-AMP search engine market share a lot higher than it currently is.
So I think this works for the 1% of people that are informed about the issue and the struggle but how do you convince that 99% of the population that frankly probably doesn’t even care? Andecdotal but I know personally that when I used DDG a couple of times I was getting slightly less relevant results than I was using Google and if this happened to anyone in the general population, they’d just keep using Google.
DDG has to show you less relevant results because they don't know much about you. The problem is that seeing less relevant search results is only considered a good thing by very privacy-sensitive people. One approach could be to advertise DDG as a search engine that works against filter bubbles and everybody sees the same results for the same query (not sure if this is actually the case).
Yes, Google also has a better index and more experience in building a search engine. I'm just arguing why DDG cannot be as good as Google, when you expect personalized results. E.g. when you are a programmer and get results for Swift the programming language rather than the pop star.
Unfortunately DDG of late has been very poor for me, and I'm not convinced it has anything to do with tracking. For example, if I'm searching for a store to buy something and the first term in the search query is my country, returning me no results at all on the first page that are stores in that country (when several such stores exist) is literally useless, and clearly DDG could have done better.
They aren't just less relevant - they are less complete. One specific example: their coverage of academic sites. As an experiment, I have entered the titles of several papers and they failed to show up in the results.
It's not just academic journal articles either: their results are, by and large, less complete - it's what initially led me to do the experiment in the first place.
The 1 percent of people that care often end up doing tech support for the 99 percent that don’t. Each time I help someone with their system I ask them if they want me to clean things u a bit and if they say yes, I show them that I’m setting FF as their default browser, DDG as their default search engine and so on.
People go with what their “expert” friend recommends all the time. If I want to buy a car, I ask a friend who is super into cars for advice, if I want a blender I ask a foodie friend. The same effect can help promote other technologies.
I moved over to DDG this week because I got added to some sort of Google A/B testing that was really annoying with no opt out (when logged into my Gmail account search results no longer showed the URL, which was bad for so many reasons). There's specific types of searches that Google is better at, but DDG is close enough that I don't mind making it my default
Yup, switched to DDG for search, Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition for browsing and web dev (bonus points for allowing extensions, e.g. uBlock Origin, in their mobile Android app), and ProtonMail for email.
The whole marketing aspect behind AMP is that its fast. This is the narrative that has sucked most publishers in. It is also not true (to the degree you think).
I run a leaderboard of major news publishes (mostly English language based ones). It relies on WebPageTest.org and tests about 60+ articles pages nightly on 3G and 'Fast 3G' speeds. The myth that you cannot have a fast web page AND have ads on it is a myth. Several organizations do it and do it well (DotDash dominates the board with their sites).
Before I hit API limits on WPT I was also testing against the AMP version of the page too. The speed differences between the regular page load and the AMP page load was often very similar. I recall in some cases (Quartz, Guardian, NYT) that regular pages loaded faster than AMP.
That aside, assuming a regular web page took 10 seconds to load (a top 10 article) you would expect that the AMP page would be faster, say down to 2 or 3 seconds in Load Time in order to make the effort of having yet another template/format to support and to justify the effort to re-implement analytics, pay-wall, and ads?
Very often it was the a saving of only a second or two. It all adds up, but as someone who works with resource strapped publishes thats not worth the resources. Thats especially true when I could have spent all that time optimizing our regular pages instead of this other project.
Why do people think AMP is faster? Pre-caching by Google.
The thing is Google (IMHO) could pre-cache regular web pages too. They don't. They don't even issue guidelines on how to make your site cache friendly, they insist on this whole specification/implementation and insist on hosting it remotely and create all sorts of barriers.
I have a different take. It's not that you can't do normal HTML as fast as AMP. It's that by preventing a lot of the things that make "normal" sites slow, it changes the whole conversation at publishing companies.
For example, here is an example conversation at a web company before AMP (and this is not really hypothetical - I had more than a few conversations like this):
Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page.
Developers: But that will kill page performance!
Marketers: But you guys are smart, make it work!
And after AMP:
Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad networks to the page.
Developers: Get bent. AMP doesn't allow that, and without AMP our SEO positioning will tank.
This is a wishful thinking counterfactual. No major search engine ever weighed obscene numbers of tracking pixels or heavy page weight very high in their SEO algo.
I'm not saying Google doesn't have perverse incentives (and with AMP, they do). But it wasn't fixed before Google and AMP is one of the counterweights to web ads + tracking beacon overload.
It might be a naive question, but: in the first case, can't you say that's impossible? Show them a competitor's website with a shitload of tracking to demonstrate the difference?
Why does every network need a separate pixel? Is the value sell the third-party tracking across domains or something? I don't understand why you can't just have one pixel and have everything fan out to multiple services server side.
You can, but it’s not universal and it requires more dev effort. Also many of these services provide different ways of covering their own unique metric.
> Why do people think AMP is faster? Pre-caching by Google.
This is a huge part of it. It is not unusual for an HTML page to load faster than an AMP version when loaded directly by a browser ( render blocking on the 3rd party amp JS bits can result in it taking longer to start rendering ).
The part that often allows AMP to win is that Google caches it to their own CDN and Chrome will pre-fetch it from there. What is interesting about that is that none of that has anything directly to do with format/spec of AMP pages.
The reason prefetching is particularly difficult to do for regular pages is the privacy implications. The act of preloading the page is a network event that is observable by the server serving that page.
If the server is the same as the linking page, for example Google search result -> Google Cache, there is no new information transmitted. That server already knows the user did query X and it knows that the page was going to fetch cache page Y, since the query page X instructs the browser to do so.
If the server is distinct from the linking page, for example Google search result -> https://healthsite.example/, then the browser will make a request to the healthsite server without the user having clicked the result. The healthsite server will learn the IP of the user, and some information about the query from which page is loaded, all without the user ever "visiting" that site. This is a major privacy violation.
AMP Pages solve this by a) being loaded from Google's cache and b) Guaranteeing no off-cache subresources will be loaded before the page is navigated to. (a) requires Google's cache to serve the page. (b) requires that the document author gives up some control over scheduling resource loading in the prefetch.
Until recently, AMP was the only game in town that could achieve this. Chrome recently shipped with Signed Exchanges, which is a network-level technology that could allow prefetching arbitrary content from a cache. This would still involve a Google cache, but does not require coordination with the document loading. Google AMP now supports this (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-am...), but it would also work with non-AMP pages.
That's not really true. Anytime anyone makes claims like this, I ask for you to design a system that meets 3 requirements:
1. Can serve dynamic content
2. Doesn't leak any user data or metadata to a third party before they explicitly consent (in other words, executing a search on Google shouldn't ping cnn.com, this makes things like link rel=preload not work).
3. Allows caching pages client side for "instant" loading
I've challenged a few users this way, and they always construct something virtually equivalent to amp.
> The whole marketing aspect behind AMP is that its fast. This is the narrative that has sucked most publishers in. It is also not true (to the degree you think).
I think what has sucked most publishers in is the belief that if they don't play ball and implement AMP, they'll suffer in Google's rankings.
Google has said over and over that AMP is not a ranking factor. If someone could definitively prove that it's not, I think publishers would be less likely to bow down to AMP. If someone could definitively prove that it _is_, then we'd have evidence of Google both lying and promoting their own technology.
Of course the "Top Stories" carousel _is_ an unfair advantage for those who use AMP -- more people just need to call out Google on this. It should either be renamed "Top AMP stories" or they should not prevent non-AMP stories from appearing in it.
> The thing is Google (IMHO) could pre-cache regular web pages too. They don't.
AMP is a defense against the increasing noise about copyright violation by including snippets and caching. It lets them say "But, Your Honor, they provided an AMP version knowing that it's intended specifically for this purpose."
The reason why we have AMP in the first place is that normal news websites are unusable. The extra caching/preloading it enables is a bonus, but the main benefit comes from AMP websites not being as shitty as regular sits.
It's pretty easy to make usable web sites with regular HTML, and it's almost certainly possible to make just as shitty AMP sites. However, AMP solved the political/bureaucratic problem by providing a strong carrot to make a non-shitty version of the web site, and made it easier to make a non-shitty one than a shitty one.
The publishers already have to spend time remaking their web site, and the goal they get provided with is "keep it simple and lightweight", and doing shitty things is made hard/expensive. So they grumble and do it, getting it mostly right. (Although they seem to have realized the "potential" and started shittifying the AMP pages too).
They could have a normal experience that is very similar. Yet, they still serve the non-AMP, ad- and tracker-laden main page that takes 20x as long to load, jumps around while doing so, and tries to blast you with an autoplaying video that remains stuck to your screen while you scroll.
I don't get the hate for AMP - it somehow succeeded in the impossible quest to get publishers to make less shitty web sites, and it does improve user experience by preloading the pages.
It's just like with the "acceptable ads" program - some web sites participating in it serve significantly less shitty ads to people who only allow "acceptable ads", while serving a worse version _of the same ad_ to everyone else.
So maybe, to answer your question: Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser. Much harder to do and unlikely to get enough momentum/incentive to actually succeed, though.
The problem with AMP is not that it limits what website creators can do. The problem is that everything is served via Google's servers and that you can have a perfectly optimized, mobile-friendly website and still have no chance in Google's search results because there is a similar result that uses AMP.
One thing I don’t understand here is whether AMP = google?
I hate privacy abuse as much as anyone, but I thought it was a standard for less insane HTML pages that any “renderer” could show. Didnt cloudflare etc do this?
Basically can someone ELI5 where the actual hate comes from (aside from being annoyed because you use google search)? Because I am all for news sites being anything other than what we get today (20mb of js ads and tracking crapware etc)
Let's say I make a page for my site that loads in 100ms in the average browser. The AMP page for some other site loads in 100ms too. In a sane world, these would have the same hope of appearing in search results. In the real world, my site will receive a ding in search ranking, even though it's just as fast. My choice is either to be less visible, or make an AMP page for no reason and cede some control to Google (well, Bing as well I suppose, but it's really Google's game here).
For the first few years, the carousel at the top of the results page was restricted to AMP content. They changed that recently after backlash (and likely legal questions) but they still appear to weight AMP more than page load time.
The problem is that publishers do not have a ton of dev resources. Now there are spending time implementing and fixing AMP pages instead of optimizing their regular pages.
I would stress that amongst most publishers they are focused on the UX experience now unlike they were a few years back (but yeah, there is no shortage of bad news sites still).
Its a little bit of a bitter pill that Google, responsible for all the ads and ultimately the shitty ad experience, invents a new format to restrict publishes from implementing the shitty ad experience that Google allows, and then gets the publishers to built it.
"AMP for Ads" makes sense. AMP in general does not.
Google Ads can be implemented in a reasonable way. It doesn't need to be a horrible experience. Greed has made them integrate 5000 other networks and they're the reason adblock is on the rise. I'd wager display ads would have much better return if they weren't abused for years.
That being said, it is the fault of these publishers to under invest in developers. It's like not investing in the printing press.
All of those networks run through Google's ad infrastructure and is allowed and encouraged by Google's ad policies. Publishers have the least control over the ads that run.
> Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser.
uMatrix and NoScript do a rather coarse-grained version of this, as you can configure them to block JS by default (and whitelist some domains, eventually default-allowing JS served from the same domain as the page, or one of the subdomains.)
But when you tell someone their website doesn't work without JS, most of the time they either ignore it or tell you it's 2019 and you shouldn't disable JS.
I've spent a month with uMatrix misconfigured so that it was disabled by default on websites. The internet turned into a horrific bloated mess.
How do these sites survive when it takes 30 seconds load the page (which freezes your browser) and then takes another 20 seconds to find the content hidden between creepy ads from ecommerce sites you recently visited?
The last time I remember the internet being this horrible was the search engines back in 1999 and that was quickly fixed when Google came along.
>> Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser.
>uMatrix and NoScript do a rather coarse-grained version of this
What about something like: window.MAX_ALLOWED_JS_STATEMENTS == 1.mio ? User could set this value in settings for each domain/subdomain. Developers could decide based on that value what should be executed and what not.
I'm not a frontend dev, but isn't this kind of variability across environment exactly what frontend devs loath? It may be even harder to properly test than checking multiple browsers.
>but the main benefit comes from AMP websites not being as shitty as regular sits.
I haven't had a single instance where I was happy with AMP. The very best scenario I've run into is that it's neutral, but most of the time it's an annoyance, because it forces me to constantly use desktop mode on my phone so I can actually get usable search results.
AMP is utter garbage. It's so bad that I switched search engines purely so I wouldn't get AMP results. I don't want a competing standard, because I want my search results to lead to the REGULAR WEBPAGE. You know, the one that actually works, unlike most AMP pages.
> Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser
We have a wonderful standard for documents - simple HTML.
If Google gave search juice to simple single page HTML+CSS documents with clear content that can be viewed without JavaScript, and Google gave lower ranking for shitty JavaScript based UIs for documents, that would tidy up the www greatly and be a force for goodness and accessibility and better security.
But Google are pushing thier ugly AMP solution instead.
I think this shows one clear area Google is evil: they are showing the colour of their money: advertising is far more important than content.
Try browsing with JavaScript turned off and doing a Google - so many "articles" are entirely inaccessible even though the text is shown in the Google search result.
If Google provided a search option for accessible and non-paywalled search results (zero JavaScript), I would use it. It seems obvious, but they don't: and why not?
Edit: aside: fuck gizmido: infinite reload if you disable JavaScript - that should give zero rank.
Edit 2: Does duckduckgo or any other search site allow searches for content that can be viewed without JavaScript enabled?
(And disclosure: I am a JavaScript developer, but for a complex app that we could never deliver using vanilla HTML.)
I think the simple answer to this is one that people on hn just don't like: most users like some js. Js enables better experiences (for most people) than just html and css. It also enables worse experiences.
Where users are given the choice, they often choose to "disable" JavaScript on articles e.g. switching to reader mode, or choosing a browser or extensions that indirectly disable JavaScript (disabling: adverts, mouse tracking, popups, scroll triggers, advertising triggers, notifications, sound, auto-start video etc etc).
Clearly users also choose rich applications, but that is not what I was talking about here. I was talking about text articles.
> I think the simple answer to this is one that people on hn just don't like: most users like some js. Js enables better experiences (for most people) than just html and css.
You sound as if "most people", aka non-technical users, are like kids who like shiny things and cannot appreciate clean and elegant design.
Mobile browsers need to show a red banner above domains that are known to "significantly drain your battery". In the really bad cases even show an interstitial similar to the "This site is not secure" pages before people proceed to them.
This targets more of the performance side of problem than the tracking & privacy side, but it does assign cost and works as signaling mechanism back to publishers when they do something that harms the user experience.
> Build a standard (or extend the AMP standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser. Much harder to do and unlikely to get enough momentum/incentive to actually succeed, though.
You realize that for such standard to succeed it would have to implemented by Google Chrome right? And they are definitively NOT going to do that because its against their best interest, so no I don't think that is a solution; the only slight chance would be to make AMP illegal so Google is forced to use some kind of alternative protocol.
> They could have a normal experience that is very similar. Yet, they still serve the non-AMP, ad- and tracker-laden main page that takes 20x as long to load, jumps around while doing so, and tries to blast you with an autoplaying video that remains stuck to your screen while you scroll.
I've never been blasted with an autoplaying video that stays stuck, on my phone. Is this even possible?
Though I live in a rich country, I used to have "only" 500MB/month of mobile data. I could open many small text/image websites, but open one of those autoplaying videos (which sometimes serve even high definition on small screens) and my mobile data for multiple days is gone in seconds. I can only imagine how worse it must be for people in poor countries.
> I can only imagine how worse it must be for people in poor countries.
Ironically, much better because they tend to have a much better mobile infrastructure. For example, in India someone pays "less than $3 a month for unlimited free calls. With that he gets 42GB of 4G data, at 1.5GB a day, which he uses for viewing videos and for WhatsApp calls to his family and friends in the state of Bihar"
You're asking the wrong question. AMP isn't bad, Google ranking AMP pages over equally-fast non-AMP pages is bad. But Google's main goal here is to preload/render content without the content knowing it is being preloaded, so that the page appears to load instantly when the user clicks on it.
What I think actually needs to happen is a standard for deferred navigation where the UA can be told to load a bunch of resources and then choose one of them to actually navigate to (basically what AMP does). The problem here is that Google is (as we type here) actively coming up with horrible standards like signed exchanges so that they never have to send users away from their own domain, so I don't think they would be fans of a standardized system that killed AMP.
AMP is also bad, because the technical steering committee is 3/7ths Google employees[1], with the rest made up of similar platforms that use others' content, like Twitter and Pinterest.
So content-producing organisations are increasingly strong-armed into building websites the way the platforms want.
Also, having large tracts of the web built using the same small set of severely limited components means we get dull, samey websites susceptible to the same hacks or bugs where things like interactive features are much more difficult or impossible.
I think a better solution would be for Google to heavily demote pages with slow load times, popup banners, notifications, etc... It would incentivize authors to deliver clean/fast pages while still leaving them freedom to design pages any way they want.
Like all things this is not as black and white as you'd think. AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice and I totally get the flip side of why people think it's dangerous.
Add an option in adblocking software that automatically redirects to the real article. I imagine there’s a fairly big overlap between users of adblocking software and users that dislike amp.
"We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web."
No-one has mentioned the to me most obvious answer: if your employer wants to/is using AMP, heavily lobby against it. Convince other developers. Get your manager on your side. Write the CEO.
Do so with good arguments why it's a bad move, not with "omg Google is evil".
Do the same thing as a user: if you are using a site that has AMP deployed, write them. Them them why it's bad for them and for their users, and how this pushes you to other alternatives.
The very first reason it gives is nonsense. Your boss will probably laugh at you if not fire you.
"AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google."
No, it keeps users within the link aggregator's domain, whether that is Google, Bing, Baidu, or a link aggregator made by a third party. The publisher is OK with this because it makes loading from all of those link aggregators instant, just like when they publish for Apple News; but in this case, they can publish once and support multiple aggregators.
Write to Apple and plead the case properly, framing it as a privacy/tracking issue, which it is.
They recently took a lot of steps to safeguard users’ privacy.
If they kill it by embedding a de-amp’er in safari, the incentive and ROI to keeping amp pages drops quite a bit.
Help your Android-using acquaintances set up Firefox.
AMP pages are hosted on a google.com uri. Get some kind of controversial content up on an AMP page, and start a grassroots "OMG, Google is hosting this bad content via AMP" campaign going with some tech-ignorant group. Maybe works better if AMP is fronting some other Google controlled user-content domain.
Conspiracy theory: most of the problems AMP solves were already solved by Google Reader, but it was hard to sell ads on that... so they killed it 2/3 years before introducing AMP to beg the solution and swoop in with AMP.
Big thumbs up! Looks great on mobile and works very well. I think I will drop them a line and congratulate them later on their efforts. Maybe others should do so, too.
They aren't mutually exclusive, though. Even if AMP died, if reading / clicking thru to your web site is a bad experience (slow loads, lots of ads, autoplay of video that's unrelated to the article, clickbait links loaded by partners, etc) these are all friction against users returning and weigh on your site's reputation. If all of the players in the space use the same tactics, users will gladly migrate towards lower friction environments.
Even if your website isn't up to the ridiculous speed standards of some tests, do yourself a favour and remove AMP. Your content and website are more important than 2 seconds shaved off the load speed. And start using smarter monetising techniques, not just stupid PPV/PPC ads.
By creating a extension which blocks AMP, for ourselves. But, if we really need to destroy AMP from internet. Unfortunately it is not really possible, unless if you have enough money to buy Google.
Actually it is possible. It doesn't have to done on client-side. You can do it via DNS settings with Pi-Hole on your network, or create your own private tunnel with Pi-Hole. After that, you need to block subdomains with amp.. Or even you can create your own iOS app for it, and yes it is also possible.
I don't, but i am asking how it can be done. I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem
>I see it increasingly more online and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped, that's a problem
How would it be unstoppable?
Google isn't a government. They don't own or control the web, nor do they have the force of law or men with guns pointed at web developers, forcing them to use AMP. It's no more likely to "seize the entire web" than ActiveX or Silverlight.
Not every site on the web is a business that's concerned with SEO... and claiming that Google controls the visibility of online businesses is not a claim that they control the web.
And they don't even really control the visibility of online businesses, so much as have outsized influence over it. It's possible to run a business and not be the first search result on Google, and other search engines do exist, as well as other venues for advertisement and promotion.
Well, I'd like to see it gone for the simple reason that many sites and blogs (especially those run by not very webtech inclined people) are using it simply because they saw somewhere that it "increases page load speed", and "that's important".
It's not important, 2 or even 5 more seconds of load speed is irrelevant (and you probably don't want the visitors who can't wait 5 seconds anyway) for good content, and you lose most of your control over your own stuff.
Stop playing into the hands of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al
As a user, I go to the trouble of clicking the original link after entering an AMP site.
Not much because I think it will make a dent in the access statistics, but because I really hate the experience.
As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately.
If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do, but that's something we could have a hand on changing collectively.
> As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me I'll do it, as others obviously do
Agreed. The company I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it.
As such money does speak louder and if the users of our product are engaging with it more because of AMP, why would we go against it?
Philosophical reasons aren't enough. To give people and companies a reason to oppose AMP you'd need to frame the reasons in a way that includes business considerations.
> I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business value from it.
Do you have an idea how are they monetizing the extra traffic. And how much more traffic is it? If google is strongarming people to use amp, isnt that fundamentally breaking net neutrality?
If you're a U.S. voter, vote for Elizabeth Warren (https://elizabethwarren.com/) in the Democratic primary and then in 2020. She's pledged to break up companies that abuse their position as both the platform and the product. Once we have a congress and executive branch that are amenable to actually enforcing anti-trust laws in office, then make your case that allowing Google to operate AMP servers and prioritize ranking sites that use it is a bad thing.
Without regulation, I'm fairly convinced the big tech companies will continue to find ways to abuse their power.
At best, google will break out of alphabet. The problem remains. Warren is indeed the most likely to fight google's dominance, but i m afraid regulation will only make it worse for their competitors.
What I'm most hoping she tries to do is break Android out of Google. Google owning the app store and forcing their products onto peoples phones with magical root powers that other apps don't have is one of the bigger problems I have with Android and its ecosystem. But we'll see; fingers crossed that the political will exists to actually do something and that she can leverage it.
To me it looks as if AMP is on the edge of being legal in terms of antitrust law. Even if Google doesn't admit to it, I bet they prefer AMPed sites in the ranking. The AMP icon might be another thing that makes it difficult with regard to legal considerations. This might be one of its major weaknesses.
If you make many web pages that do not require JavaScript, CSS, and many images or videos, then that also improves the speed, and is better for accessibility.
For other cases you do need some scripts and stuff, I have suggested a "widget" attribute nd <widget> element. Both <script> and <widget> elements support the widget attribute. If recognized by the browser and enabled by the user, then the element and its contents are replaced by something implementation-dependent (and not necessarily representable in normal HTML). Otherwise, a <widget> element acts like <span>. This also improves speed, as it can skip loading a script if it has its own version, and possibly also use a native code version specific to the browser or an extension. It also allows better user customization, for example if a special text editing widget is used on the web page (rather than a normal <textbox>), then it can be replaced with one that has vi or emacs key bindings, or to implement it without animations if the user wants to implement that script without animations.
The other alternative, for stuff that doesn't need HTML and HTTP, is to use Gopher. Then, no need to consider what kind of user interface is used and any other kind of accessibility; it already is!
Don't destroy it, embrace it. AMP is the low-javascript web many of us pine for. If browsers implemented AMP natively (and it were properly standardized), it would be great, and it has tons of potential for things like RSS readers. Google's heavy-handedness here has a lot of problems, but if they've managed to get publishers on board with a move away from the JS quagmire we should be pushing in the same direction and not fighting against it.
AMP still includes javascript that does many retarded things, including hiding the site contents until the JS is loaded, often from 3rd party CDNs. So if you're blocking the amp JS then the site just shows a blank screen, until some CSS animation trickery blends it in a few seconds later.
In other words if you use a content blocker AMP can be slower than the page would be without it.
AMP hides the entire page to avoid what is known as a Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC). The document unhides as soon as a single AMP javascript resource loads, or an 8s timeout if that fails. That javascript is very cacheable and is often already in the browser cache to begin with.
embrace something else. It would be lovely if it was implemented natively, disentangled from google, and without google strongarming websites to their own implementation and CDN.
They didnt win publishers because of their wonderful implementation, they are literally blackmailing them with deranking if they don't (I suppose I could use a carrot analogy but i m more suspicious)
There is so much evil that can happen if AMP becomes the de facto walled garden of the web. I imagine if that happens, then we 'll end up needing google's review before websites can even be reachable. Or a government could order google to effectively shut down a bunch of sites instantly. The current version of amp is worthy of destruction before it grows to become indestructible
AMP is an admission that the open Web has failed. The number of trackers, tag managers, popups and other crap to "monetize" pages has gone out of control and made majority of pages painful to open (at least without some crap filter, like an adblocker — or AMP).
If you manage to restore the health of the open Web, it'll be hard to sell a walled garden instead.
An important (but not the only) point to consider when answering this question: STOP expecting consumers to give a crap about nerdspeak topics or to care about hypothetical dystopian futures. Almost all users don't know or care about AMP. They just want stuff to load fast.
To kill it you need to propose s truly open alternative that also honestly addresses some of the reasons why Google wants AMP to exist, without ceding control to Google. This probably means some system or voluntary limit on JS/HTML that can ensure fast loading.
If anyone were to propose this it’d probably be Bing or DDG.
limit javascript to 640K of memory. so easy to implement and would fix most sites. Some other things like custom fonts could be removed from mobile browsers. The rest should be OK - 2 or 3 more seconds to load a page are not important really. After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial.
Disclaimer: I will be joining Google in a few weeks, opinions are obviously my own. Anon account because I don't know where I stand yet in this regard.
I'm one of the few people who doesn't have too much of a problem with AMP (obvious bias aside). Take this advice AMP devs who might be reading: Listen to the community, and communicate back without being condescending. A bit of humility goes a long way.
Your developer marketing over AMP is awful and you need to fix it. Not working with the tech community is causing immeasurable damage to the AMP/Google brand for the people who want to work at your company (engineers) who feel personally attacked by this.
If amp didn’t run things with the header on googles servers it would immediately stop being critiqued.
Here’s a ridiculously frustrating example of how it ruins the web experience I ran into yesterday:
I was looking for supplements, searching google with something like “site:reddit.com best supplement site”. Google directs you to amp reddit. All good so far.
So you find a thread full of links in comments. You scroll down and click one and it takes you off reddit. Good. Now you swipe back. What happens? You lose your scroll position entirely.
In a huge reddit thread full of links you literally are re-scrolling the page over and over as you try different ones.
It completely breaks the web. From the company that literally should be the champion of the web. It’s so backwards and hostile to the platform it’s hard to fathom what they are thinking. Amp could easily achieve all its goals by not forcing that stupid frame, and by letting it be hosted anywhere (google can monitor if they are using a decent CDN based on simple heuristics).
Agree, but technically if the spec is well-defined browsers can recognize that JS URL as a magic string instead of actually loading that JS, sorta like how browsers don't actually go to w3c.org when they see an HTML 4.01 doctype.
Perhaps the right place is to lobby the WHATWG for an explicit exception in the definition of the script tag to handle these ampproject.org URLs in an API-compatible way.
I mean that browsers should implement support for the AMP-specific tags directly, without needing to load the JS to do so. If the AMP spec is complete, then this should theoretically be possible.
Stupid question. I have been using Google Search on my work computer for the past year or so, but I haven't seen any changes to any of the sites I've visited. I use firefox with ublock origin everywhere. Do either of these prevent AMP from loading? or is it so subtle that I don't notice it?
It's easy: convince a huge majority of the publications that produce actual content people want to read to start making their websites fast, lightweight, and cacheable. Then there will be no need for AMP.
Until you can accomplish that, destroying amp will only make the internet worse.
Yeah, but you aren't everybody. That attitude doesn't accomplish anything.
Google gains control by finding problems and solving them their way. You can't gain that control back by dismissing those problems. if you want to reduce Google's control you have to solve a problem (that affects other people, not just you) before they do, or in a better way than they can.
Solving a problem has never been justification for a solution that brings even more.
For example, an totalitarian dictatorship would solve a ton of problems with the US political system today. But that doesn't make it an acceptable solution.
When your solution brings more harm than it resolves, it's better not to have it in the first place.
I love how you all just walked blithely right into the open jaws of this. Naysayers just a year or two ago were getting downvoted to hell on here. Now you've gotten the taste of the acid in the first stomach, and you think there's a way to climb back out. You don't seem to be grasping monopolistic companies as the ruminants they are.
I wonder if it is sufficient to fire the people at Google who work on AMP. Is management actually invested in AMP enough to re-staff it, or are they merely okay with it?
(1) The political attack: Google is increasingly coming under fire for being a monopolist. Such attacks could lead to the demise of or restrictions being put on AMP.
(2) The technical attack: kill the web as we know it. The idea here is that the web is hopelessly corrupted by the entanglement of text with code (e.g. Javascript,) the advertising-based business model, pop-ups, etc. A particular sign of this is "scanning" behavior where you go to Google News or Hacker News or your round of daily blogs and hit "reload" to see what is new. This has multiple insidious effects on the human nervous system, one is that some of your attention is used to suppress content that you've seen before, which lowers your working IQ.
It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.
>It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.
Your cure is worse than the disease.
At the moment, I can choose to use AMP or not, can choose to use Javascript or not, and can choose to publish whatever I like to the web, and whomever wants to can read it.
Your solution would appear to require me to only publish static documents which are "new, interesting, non-toxic, etc," under some arbitrary and proprietary guidelines, because that's all people would (or should) be allowed to see.
No thank you. I'd rather have freedom from all of the gatekeepers of web culture, be they FAANG or contrarian hackers.
"I think we need to replace the web browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc"
NNTP at least you can scan what is new, and other criteria you can program yourself (it can't automatically know what is interesting, so you will have to program in your own criteria for that).
Be careful with that thinking. The web is truly open (thank you TBL). Any other ‘smart’ app platform is a golden chain ( well , silver or aluminum, depending on app sales)
