The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification. That's it. This wasn't done in the past, slow pages outperformed fast ones on the SERPs because of some weird Google voodoo ranking, heck sometimes even desktop sites outperformed responsive ones on smartphones. If they had just tweaked these odd ranking rules in way that speed and size got more impact on the overall ranking there wouldn't have been any reason for AMP—the market would have regulated itself.
I'm wondering who at Google is responsible for AMP. Who created AMP's random specs (no external CSS but external fonts files, preference for four selected font providers, no JS but their JS, probable ranking preference of Google cached AMP sites, etc.). Why did they decide on the spec themselves and not as a part of an industry group? Again why didn't they just tweaked their ranking algorithm and btw, they could have also made Android's Chrome faster, it's still significantly slower than iOS' Safari. I'd be happy if this person could comment on the abuse of power (Sundar Pichai?).
It's obvious they have a different view on this. You can see this first-hand on their pagespeed tool. Pagespeed ranks your pages mostly according to random features, irregardless of size and performance. Actual test you can perform: 1kb web page with no compression ranks lower than 1mb web page after compression: "because you should enable server-side compression".
Their mobile assessment tool is similarly a joke.
The sad thing is that I'm likely getting a lower ranking on my website with has 5kb vanilla uncompressed js (gasp, not even async!) compared to the glittered rating of a 5mb homepage which loads 5mb+ more excluding webfonts from external CDNs.
You can taste that this has spread into google monoculture by the performance of their own web services.
I gave up on Google Maps a long time ago. On my desktop or laptop, it loads in chunks. Like, the map loads, then the search bar loads, then the navigation (zoom tools, etc) loads. When I click and drag, many times I end up selecting the page instead of moving the map because it hasn't finished loading. I use Bing Maps on desktop and Apple Maps on mobile, only using Google Maps when I need to verify an address is the right place or find a company's hours, since their data is better than their competitors.
But man their performance is worse. Way worse.
A bunch of people, but Malte Ubl is one of the main people and has the best tech talks on why they picked the techniques and hacks they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfekj564rs0
I'd recommend watching that for how it works than asking @amphtml questions.
Node people: I did a node specific presentation at LNUG you might like:
https://mikemaccana.github.io/quick-wins-with-node-and-amp/#...
I use AMP on CertSimple but appreciate that AMP favors 'speed achieved using specific techniques' rather than speed per se. There's the RealPolitik element where we as site owners have to do what Google say.
Why on god's name anybody would appreciate that?
A million times yes. As to why this didn't happen, I feel it would have been too restricted to "merely solving the problem", and not active enough on pushing Google's agenda to tighten its control on the web.
All other things being equal, option A being "efficient & neutral" (just penalize slow pages) is, as a business, inferior to option B "more convoluted but with potentially profitable side-effects" (AMP).
Other takes?
EDIT I should have better read the linked article before posting this, what I'm writing here is close to what the article "Lock In" section says.
They are a business, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet.
Edit, i love the downvotes for this. Google is legally required to act in their shareholders best interests. You all should understand fiduciary duty. They are building long term value for a massive (and growing) customer segment at the expense of a relatively small base of idealist tech users. Its morally reprehensible but still the correct decision in today's business climate.
What you're giving is an explanation, not an excuse. Nobody is incredulous at Google's motivations (money). We're just not satisfied with it.
Before you can solve a problem, you must identify it clearly. That's what we're doing here. Saying "yeah but it's only logical" isn't the point. Look:
> It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet.
You mean, like discussing why AMP is bad and why we shouldn't use it?
There was such a thing as ethical and societal responsibility for businesses.
Thinking making profit by any means as long as they are nominally legal is acceptable for a company is just something some people believe. No natural law that says it has to be so -- we could easily (and have had) believe the opposite.
Violating anti-trust laws?
This is an extremely vague requirement. Potentially killing their brand name among developers and potentially initiating a slow long decline into irrelevancy certainly counts as not acting in their shareholders' best interests. When google first started, their "don't be evil" mantra was one of the main reasons they succeeded, so not doing unethical shit is in their shareholders' best interests.
We do. You should understand it. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...
The interpretation of "fiduciary duty" / "they are a business" that you're implying is an urban legend, easily debunked by the fact that Google has no fiduciary duty to open a gas station in rural North Dakota as soon as they realize from Google Maps data that one would be profitable.
Using your logic if slavery were to become legal again, businesses should rush to use the free labor because "fiduciary duty".
This is why they teach business ethics.
Best interest != monetary gain.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...
Generally, Google has huge resources to spend at making their search and their advertising platform outperform others, and they haven't degenerated enough to allow a swift moving company to disrupt their market.
Oh, and if you try to fork AMP you fail the official validators and suddenly your site isn't AMP anymore. What is happening in this case is that open source is doing nothing to stop AMP from being proprietary because it's worthless unless you have the "blessed" version.
Take for example the most obvious change, to make the original URL visible in the banner. There's tens maybe hundreds of GitHub issues on this and it's still languishing. In the rare case anyone official replies it's some bs about how it will affect the user experience or "interfere with Google's cache" in some roundabout and unspecified way. They leave a few of these issues open so that whenever you start another they can close it as a duplicate. Otherwise their repo would be overrun with them.
Open source doesn't matter if someone holds the keys to the kingdom and "validates" your sources. A dark pattern indeed.
AMP in its current form is certainly evil. The only way that could be changed is if Google opens up the ability to cache the page by a different provider with different validators.
I smell antitrust
Well, thats basically how Android works.
And with the upcoming policy changes (in CDD and GCM) things will get even worse.
If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
PS: Not intending to be sarcastic. PS2: I work for google, but not on something amp related.
Which leads to the question, why is google doing this? They, you, could easily promote AMP pages while not masking the real URL! The answer is simple, profits over what's best for users.
Edit: I just did a search to find the CNN interview I mentioned, copied the URL to share here, and look it's a google URL. WHY? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/trump-v...
Apple: These article webpages are annoying - let's add a client side button to make it readable.
Google: These article webpages are annoying[0] - let's force[1] everyone to grant us a royalty-free license to their whole website.
[0] The real problem might be that Google results are "getting bad" - a thing people bring up all the time but which can only be measured individually.
So people tap the first 3 results and don't get the info they were looking for. On top of that it's slow af so people are wasting time. Now Google serves up faster pages so they'll tap through 4 or 5 results.
So why not fix the real problem instead?
[1] Yeah it's optional but only to a point. First the spammiest blogs implement it and they get a free pass to partially skip the line. Then some bigger sites implement it and even things out. People here are rightfully afraid that within 12 months you can't even hit page 2 without AMP.
So you have to load the AMP page and then a potentially bloated normal page. That's AMP doing the exact opposite of it's intended (or at least stated) purpose. Noscript, flashblock and adblock have done far more for page speeds than than AMP ever will.
If I didn't know this was for mobile browsers I would think it was a gift to blind users who do not use GUIs.
amphtml links also provide an easy way around paywalls, most of the time.
I have no idea what is the true purpose of these amphtml links. It sounds like it's some advertising nonsense.
As a text-only browser user I see no ads and experience no page load delays, but I do see how overstuffed web pages have become.
In this regard, amphtml is a breath of fresh air.
The bar has been set. Can you find a way to both resolve personal frustration and provide a better experience? Maybe a browser plugin?
After which I was invited to meet Google AMP team and to express my concerns, you can read my Q&A here: https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/
TLDR; A lot of concerns are getting addressed
1. Minor, but the bar at the top is now scrollable on all devices, including (finally) iOS: https://www.alexkras.com/amp-toolbar-is-now-scrollable-on-sa..., it was not when I first wrote the article, so it's a good sign.
2. It is my understanding that the team is actively working on a way to "fix" the link issue, and give an easy way to get to original article, although it remains to be seen how they will approach it.
3. You can opt out from AMP cache on the web site end, but it really defeats the purpose. Read more here: https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/
4. Most importantly, looks like there is even internal pressure to give people an option to Turn Off AMP on the search engine side, if they don't like it. See this, for example: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312 @cramforce is THE tech lead on AMP and @slightlylate is also a big shot at Google on Chrome Team.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about AMP, on one side I really like the speed, on the other I hate how it breaks the Web as we know it.
The downside of AMP seems to me so comically larger than the upside that this should be much more a black-or-white issue than it currently is. Good that they are moving to fixing it, but very bad that this thing exists as it is right now in the first place.
I recognize that they are solving a real problem for users and I don't want to throw out a baby with the bath water.
At the same time I am VERY concerned with caching aspect of AMP. I am holding back on my judgment until they have some time to address some of the concerns, to see if I feel better about it.
But may be people on this thread are right, and a more aggressive stance is warranted...
I hate those bars that reappear when I scroll up, I scroll up to reread a paragraph that I realized I just skimmed or I didn't quite comprehend and instead I get a big blank space with a link to somewhere I do not want to go. They fundamentally break expected scrolling behaviour.
AMP is cancer and should be roundly decried. It's disgusting you can't even turn it off in google search.
They're breaking the web and breaking everyone's web pages and content makers are meekly supporting them instead of kicking up a stink.
Edit: Ah, yes, your "make the header clickable" fixes this.
In many respects I like gardens, I like curated contents.
But I like the web more. The web needs diversity. We need more search engines for instance.
On a serious note. Escaping Google on the internet is impossible. Can't be done without inconvenience.
It's bad enough that I've had to switch to using Bing on mobile, despite the worse results, and I'm actually genuinely fearful for the first time about the openness of the web.
Time to give DuckDuckGo another try I guess...
Where?
It seems there is no alternative for those who care about their rank and clicks.
I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.
AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-...
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-...
Wouldn't that effectively mean that in a search query followed by an AMP site visit only Google has the opportunity to show targeted ads ?
edit: This is with an ad blocker on though.
Here's a much better example.
AMP - https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2...
No-AMP - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/01/1...
On the normal implementation, clicking links on mobile from Google search, this is mostly not a problem because you're unlikely to land on some random guy's WordPress from a serp. But if you're triggering a lookup of AMP wherever it's available, you end up on a lot of broken sites clicking links from reddit and HN and stack overflow sources.
I've found a better compromise is an extension that doesn't load amp by default, but just puts a button in your toolbar that you can request an amp version with.
This probably would speed up loading times as it would only have to display/load certain content.
I love 'reading mode' on firefox and safari (mobile). Unsure what other browsers support it but they all should.
Even with ads the original is an easier read on desktop....
Is it possible to set it as default on iOS/Android somehow? AMP really frustratingly breaks link sharing, and I'd like to totally avoid it.
!g search query
Of course, this also works if you type this query in at duckduckgo.com
Edit to add: I guess it is a matter of time before amp pages also appear on the encrypted subdomain; another incentive to switch to DDG now.
Many years ago, Google Search existed only on http:// and schools used filters to block searches that they didn't like. Then Google shipped https:// for search on www.google.com, upset the schools because they could no longer block just some searches, then moved encrypted search to encrypted.google.com so that the entire domain could be blocked: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2010/06/an-update-on-encrypted-...
>1. Clicking on an ad:
> - https://google.com : Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page where they'd append your search query to the referrer information.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the advertiser uses HTTP, Google will not let the advertiser know about your query. If the advertiser uses HTTPS, they will receive the referrer information normally (including your search query).
>2. Clicking on a normal search result:
> - https://google.com : If the website uses HTTP, Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page and will not append your search query to the referrer information. They'll only tell the website that you're coming from Google. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the website you click in the results uses HTTP, it will have no idea where you're coming from or what your search query is. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
[0] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32367/what-is-th...
You used to have to use that domain to run searches over HTTPS. Google's enabled that for all users now, so it's kind of obsolete -- but apparently it still behaves a little bit differently?
It also results in lower quality news appearing at the top of searches in cases where they have implemented AMP and the better sources haven't.
(with all five visible comments, and since the full comments are almost certainly what I was searching for, I end up having to click through to the full page anyway every time)
The # 1 reason why AMP bothers me is when I want to share a link with someone, I don't want to send an AMP link.
AMP doesn't work on firefox.
http://phandroid.com/2014/12/31/google-lyrics-search/
In all fairness, lyric sites were terrible. Slow, riddled with ads, and sometimes incorrect. While Google's lyrics are a great service to the user, they're at the top of search and displayed inline. There's no reason to go to lyric sites anymore.
My biggest fear is Structured Data and AMP. With Structure Data, you volunteer your most valuable data in a format Google can easily consume and adapt to its own needs - all so you can get better page rankings. When Google introduces its own service in the same market - just like lyrics - you're effectively cut off from your audience. And with AMP, you don't have to wait for Google to siphon your traffic - you're volunteering.
I couldn't imagine dealing with supporting two deployments.
give a try for a day or so. Once I did, I can't go back to keeping it on because the web seems so slow by comparison.
On FF mobile, with the "Toggle Javascript enabled" add-on it takes me 3 clicks to reload a page with JS disabled.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/qJKSvMC.png [1] http://i.imgur.com/zYDZrtr.png
Edit: I couldn't reproduce this with Chromium on Ubuntu 16.10. I might set up an Arch Linux box to see if that makes a difference.
Maybe you use some strange fonts?
Mind you, this just proves that the header is superfluous. Existing technology called 'the back button' exists to take the user back to where they came from, and it's up to Google to decide how their results page behaves when this happens.
I really think AMP can benefit a lot from PR stand point by letting techies opt out from it, but leaving it on for "regular" users. See https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312
Google is search, everything else is secondary. 20 people in a room testing this should have been all the red flags they needed to fix it before launch.
The first time I encountered an AMP page I figured clicking the x would load the actual page. I was wrong.
Let's assume this got much worse, and evidence came out that private political interests worked with Google to interfere with informed consent by reprioritizing what some called "fake news", when really what was being called fake news was actually anti-government activists pointing out collusion between tech companies and the government. Clearly, Google would be an agent to destroying democracy.
I imagine detecting that a visitor came from Google, and showing them an interstitial informing the user they have come from a state-sponsored search engine, and letting them know what that means and the alternatives to Google.
I think it's actually pretty trivial to build something like this with recipes for the popular CDNs and servers out there. Even a JS snippet would be totally fine.
Google is pursuing AMP not because it wants to promote a better experience on the web, but because Google wants to be the provider whose technology and own practices perform best on SRPs. They are acting like capitalist pigs, and we should coordinate a protest against Google to let them know they can't just walk all over us with no consequences.
January 20th seems like an ideal day.
I know a few people who view Facebook's app on their phone as the Internet and who would never think to Google search a question. I'd be interested to know how widespread that actually is among Facebook's vast user base, in comparison to how many use Google and avoid Facebook.
The technical side of SEO – and thus the justification of AMP – is a joke if a trash website like my competitor's can be on #1.
I think AMP is Google's next SPDY. As you know, SPDY eventually became HTTP/2 through an open standardization process, and Google has since deprecated SPDY in favor of the open HTTP/2 standard.
AMP is similarly open. While it is still Google-driven at this stage, other companies are already iterating on it and implementing their own AMP caches[0]. There's no reason to believe Google is attempting to "lock-in" users to Google (and this article provides no evidence of that).
Every major tech company is trying to keep up with the demands of users. They demand content that loads really fast. People in many parts of the world have poor access to mobile data, which increases the importance of this even further.
As mentioned in this article, both Apple and Facebook are also working on similar projects. At least you can send a pull request to Google's.
Is Google using its influence to push the web in a different direction? Yes. Is it a bad thing? I don't think so, but others may disagree. The issue is that this article provides no argument that AMP is a bad thing, but rather a conspiracy theory that it is Google's attempt at "lock-in".
I agree that requiring an external Javascript to be loaded is a privacy issue, and that should be fixed. How about contributing a solution?
If not AMP or something along the same lines, how do we the tech community solve the problem of delivering static articles lightning-fast?
[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...
With AMP I can actually read articles from my local newspaper or TV station.
I guess in this case, I see it as a win for fast loading pages with just the article I'm looking for. Using AMP is my way of fighting back against autoplaying video ads and click bait links mixed in with news.
...but they don't, which is the point.
I'll throw my hat in on being a fan of reading news on AMP pages as well (though reddit amp does seem completely broken). I wouldn't care in the least if news site x instead wrote a fast site, I'd happily use that instead. But until they do, yeah, as a user I'll click on the amp link first.
Draft: http://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/ Github: https://github.com/wicg/ContentPerformancePolicy/ Launch article: https://timkadlec.com/2016/02/a-standardized-alternative-to-... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787462
While this is a good recommendation, I'm not sure this is possible with AMP, as they don't provide versioned URLs; the JS loaded keeps changing over time.
Edit: Indeed, this was rejected: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/534
I have several other issues as well, but they are mentioned in the article.
"Cloudflare now powers the only compliant non-Google AMP cache with all the same performance and security benefits as Google."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
The term "compliant" would make it seems as though Google has them as a trusted source now and as such will show that content in AMP features in Google
Given that there are at least three similar specs, shouldn't there be a Light HTML5, or something that provides the same set of underlying guarantees?
I can't disable any of this from the browser and I can't choose to view the non-AMP version. It's painfully frustrating, and I'm being forced to read my news AMP's way instead of my way.
That's AMP.
Having browsed the web via mobile for several years with chrome, I have yet to encounter an AMP page. Do I have to enable something or is this region specific? I live in Norway if that matters.
Six months ago I switched my mobile browser from chrome to firefox but I still se nothing (nor the bar with the X everyone are talking about).
That said, Google should give option to opt-out from CDN caching (if they don't already) as otherwise implementing AMP gives Google the right to host your content on their domain.
HTML is perfectly fast. Sites are only show because of the media/ads/stuff that's put on them, most of which is a business requirement.
Factoring site speed/weight into search and traffic rankings could've easily pressured sites into making much better progress that would benefit anyone using a browser, instead of this random fork that also takes away even more of the limited time and resources that a publisher has to work on their main site.
I like Chrome and Google's efforts in making the web faster but this is one of the worst projects they've ever started.
Again I'm not doing anything fancy, I don't handle any user data (JS breach at google is least of my concern) or have any concern regarding where Google might take AMP.
I personally like the idea behind AMP. With all these over the top JS libraries and bloating web applications, a restrict markup that enforces speed over spectacle is a positive change.
There should be a opt-in for every search that specifies amp explicity to signify you want it. Google should be taken to the cleaners for trying to expand its market power so egregriously. Since its is not going to happen in the US at least the EU can step in. There has to be something illegal about these kinds of monopolistic actions.
On the topic of AMP being a problem for web standards, I agree. I also can't afford to miss opportunities to get ahead either.
Is it because I don't use Google as my goto search engine? (I use ddg almost exclusively.)
Or, is it because I don't use Android Chrome as my browser? (I'm on Firefox Mobile unless some site owners forgot to test on Firefox and I'm forced onto Chrome.)
Obviously, some people might copy the AMP-link themselves and post it somewhere, but if you're not much on social media, it's entirely possible that you just haven't seen that yet.
Site speed is a factor in search ranking. Imagine how fast Google benchmarks the speed of a page that is hosted on their own servers...
Edit: sorry that was actually in the article.
This wouldn't be that big a deal if Google didn't emphasize the rank of AMP pages. There aren't a lot of alternatives out there to search, and Google dominates the market in much of the world.
Facebook and others have arrived to take significant time away from that product. Then combine that with things like Facebook Video and Instant Articles. Google is in a difficult position where Facebook may be able to start offering up a superior product for content as opposed to the web.
If you want to blame a big corp for AMP, you should probably take a closer look at Facebook as without it Google risks losing a large chunk of its market.
It was like those old-school days where sites tried to put their frame around the window you were browsing so their ads constantly showed.
Or like the toolbar crapware.
This sucks.
You can read more advantages at http://alphapages.io
AMP itself isn't so bad- asynchronous Javascript (not no script as the article suggests) and it is still valid HTML- it just has extra properties on tags (just how Angular does).
It's absolutely baffling how anyone at google thought this was a good idea. I mean really, how do you mess something so simple up this bad?
The user experience is terrible, the implementation is terrible, the fundamental technical idea is terrible... it's gotta go back.
