It's Google throwing its weight to force websites into dubious practices all in favor of an alleged performance. Users also get the short end by being served low quality pages instead of the full experiences they expect.
I have this extension [1] to make sure I never visit an AMP page again.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
People usually don't want a "full experience" when reading news. Especially when the "full experience" is pop-up ads and autoplaying video.
The bad part about AMP is that it is tied to Google services. But once de-Googled, AMP is really good 99% of the times, I leave 1% for those web designers who really use their skills to provide a better user experience, and do it right.
Considering all the extra JS it requires to preload, I also question it from a practical standpoint.
Of course, if you are otherwise including 3MB of JS for no reason, and it isn't cached, and you aren't using a CDN, maybe, perhaps, Google's CDN might serve it faster..
Though to be fair, I use FF, so AMP is hostile to it, and anyways FF has this great reader mode..
But do you have any numbers to back up the claims that any AMP pages are ever better?
The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results.
I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
But the question is do they want news sites to get promoted over the actual content they were looking for because news sites can be amped and dynamic content sites can not be amped?
But if you're looking for something more generally extensible to work around AMP and other things that make the modern mobile internet frustrating, we've been working on a browser for iOS that's extensible with low code/no-code extensions as well as JS.
We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8
Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com
For example, why not rank https://lite.cnn.com/en above https://cnn.com/?
exactly this, it's WAP/WML all over again
The speed boost is negligible if it even exists and all it serves to do is add an additional stupid pop up I have to click out of to read a web page.
I really wish I could switch to DDG but queries related to anything technical, like biology or programming, usually fail to turn up any relevant results.
On fast internet? Yeah, negligible. On non US/European internet, though, it's very tangible.
Just my experience, though.
Do you want to retry that description?
I'm assuming you must be running some kind of extension or blocker that is interfering?
There are plenty of criticisms of AMP but failing to load content isn't really one of them. Also the speed boost is massive. AMP pages usually show content instantaneously due to precaching, while a new site takes 5-7 seconds to load.
This obviously isn't the typical experience with AMP, but they clearly have something broken somewhere.
- Content moving around for a few seconds after the page loads (and of course right when I go to click on something).
- No auto-playing audio.
They are currently facing lawsuits in court in both the US and EU I believe for anti-competitive practices, AMP being one of them.
* Google no longer treats AMP pages as special as of a few weeks ago.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operators_in_C_and_C%2B%2B
Isn't that hyper-misleading? Click-through is a ranking factor, and especially click-through without return and click-through to something else on same results page, and being on the mobile carousel increases click-through. Or do they exclude those clicks from ranking?
It seems like they do assume amp pages are high-performance, but they're not the only way to achieve high performance.
A website I consult in a popular sports niche and has a slow, broken, ad-infested main website grew its traffic 500% with AMP.
On the main website, it's still broken. On AMP it's... AMP. So Google thinks it's fast enough/good enough.
On AMP we implemented a lot of annoying CTAs to go to the main website. ”Read Full Article here” ”Read more” ”Details at...”
In the past this website would have needed to optimize its real website to gain this much visibility in the search engines. Now they just AMP, then they optimize their AMP to real-world-website CTR, and can continue to have a... sub ideal.... website.
AMP is whitelisted cloaking for slow websites. And a burden on webmasters and developers.
I always say AMP is the internet if germans (most AMP leads were at one point germans) would have invented it (I am Austrian, we always joke about Germans ): Efficient, mostly boring and long term innovation harmful.
I am rooting for AMP to die. Sadly it will still be around for about 5 years until the ”what a great journey” blogpost.
So Google can push through a gatekeeping approach to further controlling online content. After you take hostages, then you decide what kind of ransom you want. It's how every monopoly tends to behave, they push outward leveraging their position and try to put as many defensive moats into place as they can.
If speed was actually their concern, they happen to control a search monopoly that pretends to very much care about performance and speed. If any of that were really true, they can practically flip a switch and smash every slow site on the Web. Aggressively turn up the penalty on such terrible sites. In less than a year they'd all jump to and get in line, or they would die, banished from all search results (sorry, your site sucks so bad we're not even going to index that garbage). Google is happy to banish sites for political-ideological reasons based on the bias of their employees, but they can't be bothered for performance reasons? It reveals a lot as Google knows it would be easy to fix without AMP. Speed is not the primary agenda of AMP, control is; speed is an excellent cover story.
Just like Apple.
Fuck all of these companies. The DOJ needs to split them at the seams.
Edit: damn these downvotes. I typed out an essay as a response to someone asking about the Great Filter in another thread, and now HN is blocking me for posting due to getting so many downvotes.
I hate the Apple users censoring everyone that disagrees with them or points out negative things about their company. It's a huge problem.
The perfect analogy for Apple is the CCP. Developers have to behave exactly like Apple wants to distribute software, or they're toast. And Apple users rush to defend this. They're "protected" by big Papa Bear Apple. They don't see this as a reduction of freedoms or strong arming. They got what they wanted and they're fervent about it, and they don't see the bigger picture.
Apple isn't even protecting people. They're protecting their market lead. Apple users mean shit to them. They'd let us repair and install on our own if otherwise. The brand goes to people's heads just like other luxury brands (BMW, Dior, Gucci, etc.) - it's a lifestyle that needs to be signaled and defended.
Isn't it obvious that they're bad for the world?
Liberty or death. When did we forget that?
I really like Nintendo. I grew up with them. Zelda is the best thing ever. It's the Miyazaki of gaming. But you know what? They're fucking assholes to fans. They take down artistic endeavors that companies like Square Enix and Sega encourage. They're shutting down the vibrant Melee tournament scene. And for that, they've earned my scorn.
You can like something your favorite company makes but also hate their actions.
Apple isn't a loving mother. It's an enterprise and we're just users. They shouldn't have such power at their disposal. It's bad for all of us.
The computing sector shouldn't be Apple's own private fiefdom.
Exit since I still can't post responses:
I'm taking this up with Lucy McBath (D-GA) instead. I hope that everyone else that sees the incredible harm Apple is doing takes an hour to write their legislators as well. Spell out the problem so they can understand it. Arguing with people online isn't as effective as getting the DOJ to address the problem.
But seriously: why do you assume that improving their loading speed would only be possible with mediocre outcomes?
The problem here isn't that it's impossible to create a fast website, it's really not all that hard. The problem is prioritizing that over quick short term wins and "sexier" work.
Web developers deliver crap, ad laden slow websites - with HORRIBLE users experiences.
Content jumps around as the web page loads, sometimes even 5 - 10 seconds later!
Autoplaying content is hell - but they seem to love it.
Popovers, unders and sliders gallore.
And for some reasons the GIANT mess of analytics trackers and CSS and dynamic content means the thing is
a) slow b) nightmare on a phone
Google has basically FORCED a bunch of these idiots to actually make a page usable and pleasant. It loads fast.
What I don't get - all these high and mighty web devs can't seem to deliver clean websites that work without Google beating them over the heads with AMP. Is it that they cower in front of management with demands for YET ANOTHER tracker (seriously, websites ship with like 10 trackers - why?) They feel the need to show off their lazy loading dynamic content skills that jank the page?
So thank goodness for AMP, perhaps developers will actually try to compete with it a bit by building usable non-amp websites.
And trust me, users are getting trained that the lighting bolt actually does mean FAST.
Anyways - when I read another rant from a web developer about AMP - a small request. How about de-jankifying and de-scamifying the web first a bit more? Then we won't need to turn to google for all this stuff.
They (we) carry some responsibility for this but it is most definitely shared with stakeholders (often higher ups that determine whether you have food on your table next month) that push this bullshit.
No webdeveloper is happy with a crap website.
I'll fully back the claim the rank and file web developers are idiots. But primarily because the smart ones would never consider themselves just 'web developers'.
Yeah, that doesn't exempt you from blame as much as you would like.
Listening to these developers rant about what is probably the fastest and most user friendly effort while they push out stuff that makes yours eyes bleed is ridiculous.
All web developers should all be forced to browse with Adblock off and no auto play block.
Mgmt if it shows a tiny bump in some ad click metric for a quarter will shove a popover out while they burn the long term value in the web and their sites.
The fact that google has to push these types of things is embarrassing.
I have spent countless hours doing real optimizations on a website with real traffic, without submitting to AMP (which I view as a disgusting move by Google and everyone involved with it.) (Traffic which, by the way, does not reflect the device profiles of what Google considers the "average" user, based on real vs. lab results in Lighthouse -- which is forcing us to work on issues that are not proportionally relevant to our business, though I will concede it's a positive improvement for us overall. But still an unwanted Google influence, like most SEO.. but moreso.)
Core Web Vitals should render AMP irrelevant, and thus seeing as both projects are being pushed by Google, it's time Google takes AMP behind the barn. Unfortunately Core Web Vitals takes a pretty hard stance against bleeding edge technology like (Vue/React) server side rendering with client hydration. Anything beyond a todo app starts to see considerable main thread time during hydration which obliterates the Core Web Vitals scores. I predict with continued focus on CWV we will see: much greater focus on startup times for client side apps (including better hydration strategies), and maybe even some server-side only JS front end frameworks -- more aligned with the JAMstack idea (everything old is new again, yay.)
As much grief as CWV has caused me, it is the correct solution to the problem of slow websites and its impending inclusion in Google's page rankings should have a positive impact on the overall health of the web.
Why people who aren't being paid by Google continue to defend AMP absolutely baffles me.
To me, this doesn't sound unfortunate, it sounds great! I'm so tired of the drag that these frameworks cause when they are applied in situations which don't help. There are definitely use cases for such heavy and slow frameworks, but they should not be used for standard web pages, and should pay the penalty in search results when a web page with similar information is more responsive.
> As much grief as CWV has caused me, it is the correct solution to the problem of slow websites
Maybe core web vitals will succeed but I'm skeptical. A big part of AMP's success was ease of implementation. Sites with skilled, motivated, and empowered developers are going to be fine regardless of what technology Google tries to push. It's the other sites (ie, most sites) that I worry about.
What an excellent, mediocre, and/or bad recommendation!
The sentence is formulated really unfortunate, though. I also wouldn't approve it.
The amount of work required to efficiently deliver a second version of your content sounds like such a horrible terrible idea. HN mindset about Google aside, something strictly AMP would likely be a easier to replace than the mess that tries to do both.
There will need to be a bigger driving force to get amp out of popularity. As long as AMP pages unlock preferential treatment in search results (mobile carousels), sites that want to compete will be forced to use them.
Totally agree with you about this.
> There will need to be a bigger driving force to get amp out of popularity
Oddly enough the bigger driving force will almost certainly be the internal politics of Google causing it be shoved on the pile of "things we used to think were important" out the back of the Googleplex.
Bias disclosure: I use a text-only browser and AMP pages look great in links. For a links user, the AMP version can be useful on some sites that have a large amount of cruft, e.g., excessive number of same site URLs, at the top of the page, with the content buried below it, and yet more cruft at the bottom. AMP eliminates the necessary scrolling on such sites.
It already is. AMP was spun off into OpenJS Foundation in 2019.
You can run AMP on your website without having to touch Google.
Google (Alphabet) needs to be broken up.
Now, AMP probably isn't the best solution for the problem, as many of the comments and other sources on the Internet do point out, but the website obesity crisis ( https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm ) is probably the actual problem that should be addressed, rather than just attempting to downplay the problem by saying that advances in how fast connections are will make it less annoying.
Of course, the technical advancements are nice, but it still feels like some version of Wirth's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ) that's applied to the web, where the pages themselves should just be more lightweight and both drain less battery and consume less power (as well as require less processing power to render, because some of the modern sites are ridiculous in this regard, i can no longer have 50+ tabs open on a device with 4 GB of RAM without using tab suspension plugins).
- can't share articles using android's builtin share widgets because it points to the amp pages
- Navigating away using "Open in $BROWSER" option from the Google app in Android opens up the amp page again instead of the source page.
- can't see embedded article widgets like tweet blocks, maps, overlays, animations
- Attempting to do things like Comment on an article triggers navigation away from the AMP page to the actual site, forcing you to then scroll down once more
I've become accustomed to opening AMP pages and looking for "View article on actual site" link as a matter of course. It's just so horrible.
https://yandex.com/dev/turbo/doc/concepts/index.html/
They seem to work on similar principles.
China and Russia will still have this issue as well.
Google needs an anti-trust slap for Amp. Until it gets it, it’s here to stay.
User coldpie recommended [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467438 ] the firefox extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
text.npr.org and lite.cnn.com
Just plain text, if I want more, then I go look at the ad revenue site and I'm good to go. More news should be available to the public. And since you asked, I do send an annual donation to NPR to cover the usage of the text site.
- google.com/amp
- ampproject.org
I've been including AMP in my blocklist for quite a while now, and while I've occasionally felt like I'm tilting at windmills, it's honestly not much more inconvenient.
Before blocking AMP, I would get confused for a few seconds by a broken page that looked like a real page. Now I just see an empty page immediately, prompting me to get to the real page more quickly.
