AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves
> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.
I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.
Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.
The stamp of approval for sub n seconds as a benchmark does sound like a better approach but at this point google is acting like a parent whose told their children to clean their room, or the parent is going to clean the room by tossing everything out. I get the impression that Google only cares about the results when it comes to making the Web faster, and doesn't care about anyone else's costs at this point
This is what it comes down to. AMP is failing at that.
Isn't reddit pretty simple text? Are you running RES at all?
What about reddit's AMP pages [1]?
It talks about building a SPA, and rendering on the client side using JavaScript. It also talks about being AMP compliant.
Those goals cannot coexist.
Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)
- Images not having defined heights, leading to content jumping up as I'm reading
- Ads loading and unloading, leading to the page jittering up and down erratically, making the content unreadable
- Auto-playing videos: some start playing audio, some have the audio muted but still pause any music I have playing
- Those ads that scroll up across the page (which wouldn't be a problem, but they scroll at a third of the speed that I drag them up at)
- The "Read Full Story" buttons that animate the content downwards, freezing everything for a few seconds while the dumb animation plays
- Web fonts taking an eternity to load, leaving me with no content for ten, fifteen, or more seconds
- Web fonts loading unexpectedly and causing all the text to reflow, destroying my scroll position
There are so many more things.
But here's the thing: there are no ad-blockers for Chrome on Android. I can't turn this crap off. And overwhelmingly, I can't just pay someone money to make it stop. I would gladly hand over fifty bucks or more every month to read news in peace, but there's no centralized way to do that.
AMP, at the very least, gets rid of these problems for me. Top bar and URL issues aside, clicking an AMP link is infinitely less frustrating than clicking a non-AMP link.
AMP gives a great user experience on mobile, at least speed-wise. I haven't had any real complaints as a user. (Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google Alphabet company.)
I use AdGuard [1] (which is a system-wide ad-blocker for Android that doesn't require root privileges) along with Brave [2] set as a custom tab provider in Chromer [3] to get rid of pretty much all ads in both apps and websites (regardless of browser).
[1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom...
My desktop is the opposite, but that's because my desktop has Chrome extensions.
1. Scrolling momentum is very different, making it feel non-native
2. The URL bar doesn't hide normally. Scroll down in portrait mode and it doesn't hide.
3. The URL bar doesn't un-hide normally. Switch to landscape mode and scroll up, the URL bar does not reveal itself.
4. Safari Reader mode often doesn't work.
5. Scrolling before the page is done loading can make it look like there's less content then there actually is.
6. Some dynamic sites misbehave (e.g. reddit does not show me as logged in).
7. Copying the URL results in some Google thing instead of the real URL
8. Relationship between AMP X close button and Back button is confusing
I am curious which of these you experience, which you don't notice, and which you don't experience at all if you are an Android user?
This is exceptionally annoying, I agree. As a tip though, if you tap the 'sharing' widget, and scroll, you'll see a 'request desktop site' option that will give you the 'proper' URL.
1. Scrolling seems native to me. I just tried it again, maybe it seemed off for a moment. It's hard to tell. I don't find that the scrolling is broken as it is on many websites, and it's not difficult to achieve with -webkit-overflow-scroll: touch in one's CSS, i.e. they could fix this if it's not native already.
2. The URL bar does indeed remain visible. This is normal behaviour when you disable overflow scrolling on the root/body element and enable it on a child element instead. There are a couple of reasons to do this: if you want to size your page relative to the viewport and don't want that size to change when the user scrolls up and down, i.e. you don't want that size to change due to a disappearing/reappearing URL bar, you can force the URL bar to stay visible, thereby forcing a constant height, by doing what I described.
3. This definitely doesn't happen to me.
4. I have yet to encounter an AMP link that didn't work with Safari Reader. I would blame the author of the specific AMP page before blaming AMP as a whole if it works most of the time on other websites.
5. seems like a hazard with most dynamic websites.
6. I cannot say I have experienced, but I do not use Reddit, so maybe that's why.
7. is true. Can't avoid that, regrettably — the whole point of AMP is to serve the site from Google's CDN (and to use AMP components to follow best practices for loading assets). However, I wouldn't call it a disadvantage.
8. I do not find it confusing.
I think 2/3/8 are parts of a bigger and more general problem. The AMP bar simply isn't necessary. It's part of Google's system of control around their AMP pages. AMP should just be an optional way to display pages, there shouldn't be this whole sub-app experience of flicking between AMP articles once an article has been selected from the Google SERP.
It's a nice idea and everything, but what they should have done is implement a similar thing to the Safari reading list, where you're suggested the next article at the bottom of the one you're reading, rather than having an ugly ass navigation bar occupy 10% of the screen.
For one thing, this breaks the gestures for going backwards and forwards in navigation history in iOS Safari, which I would expect to be the first and foremost complaint by any iOS Safari user grappling with AMP.
Is it different from other web pages, or from scrolling a native app? At the end of the day, an AMP site is HTML.
But it's also sad that something not-quite-open is taking over an important part of the web. AMP is this Google-wrapped version of a part of the web that tries to keep you in Google's land rather than allowing you to browse the site you visited.
As a user, I like clicking on AMP links. But in a certain way, it's like eating candy. I know it's not good for the web and openness over the long term. But in the short term, it's just so nice.
* How difficult it will be if I want to share the link with someone (because I don't want to share an AMP link).
* How difficult it is if I want to go exploring around the site that has the thing I am reading.
I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of the search results.
Google really really really needs to fix amp links.
That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites.
Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw websites.
Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have a small benefit.
This system is easy to follow and validate though. Is it AMP compatible or not AMP compatible?
What if instead of forcing sites to re-implement themselves using a set of custom JavaScript components they actually changed they way browsers behaved e.g. via meta tag / header etc.?
This is just the beginning guys. It shows the BS business Google Search has become. Either comply to Google Internet™ or get lost.
If Google collapsed tomorrow, nothing of value will be lost and I'm awaiting eagerly for that day to come.
Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links.
Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly.
They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc.
Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems.
Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.
To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.
Or maybe, once Google has a hosted copy of an AMP page, it will never remove it.
Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.
Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions.
However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for.
FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed.
Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really.
Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling. Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.
I certainly never would never have bothered setting up a build process to inline CSS previously.
Until Google deprecates it in July.
I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet. Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site performance).
