If you want to incentivise not delivering multi-megabyte "experiences" to people, I could see a case for feeding page weight into the ranking algorithm. Then people would be less inclined to have tag managers loading tag managers loading a zillion random js trackers.
I have personally saved at least one decent laptop from landfill by installing uBlock Origin on it, and making the web usable again.
Connection count multiplied by number of bytes transferred.
That would get rid of the cruft on the web in a heartbeat.
Every SEO consultant would suddenly have an actual job, playing code golf on CSS and HTML to deliver the content in the minimum number of bytes possible.
Google already wrote AMP which parses page content and presents the user with Google's ideal version of the page. Just include the delta in the ranking. The more a page has to be "cleaned" by AMP the lower it ranks.
Yeah good point. In general something like that could still work though. Whatever characteristics of a page Google is trying to "fix" with AMP could just be added to the ranking algorithm.
Exactly, make it an internal delta signal thing rather than pushing it externally on the entire web. Yes they can because of their position and size, but should they? No they shouldn't.
This penalizes data-heavy websites, though, no? For example, I can see how a photojournalism piece with lots of photos would be ranked to hell, whereas a content-free text piece would be ranked very highly.
But on the same subject all pages would be data heavy. Only where a data heavy page would compete with a similar page that was lightweight would the one be ranked above the other.
But your average news page would weigh in roughly the same no matter what the source was. Assuming you'd strip out all the cruft.
For reference, I optimized my website a while ago and ended up with the average page being < 15K.
> But on the same subject all pages would be data heavy.
Not all of them. For a trivial example, an in-depth article about a topic would be penalized more than a more epidermic one, because it would contain more text, graphs, etc.
> For reference, I optimized my website a while ago and ended up with the average page being < 15K.
I feel you, I absolutely hate that my website uses a bunch of stuff for almost no reason. 80 KB of CSS or 90 KB of font isn't awesome, and I started a project to provide information on how to create lighter websites (https://www.lightentheweb.com/, stalled a bit).
All I'm saying here, though, is that the solution is more nuanced than "heavier = lower". AMP is definitely not a step in the right direction, though. I wonder if Google could give sites that used a specific CSS file and no JS a bump, rather than loading things on their own domain.
> For a trivial example, an in-depth article about a topic would be penalized more than a more epidermic one, because it would contain more text, graphs, etc.
But such trivial examples should be trivial to get right no? It's all about the relative weight of the various factors that determine the ranking and a 'lightweight' article could be recognized as such.
Well, that's my point, it's not trivial to automatically recognize which photos are content and which are style. You want to have many content photos, but having many style photos probably means cruft.
It doesn't, it just forces you to display the pages through Google, stripping everything else, which is much easier to implement than recognizing if a web page's heft is because of legitimate content or ads.
So what difference would it make? After all, this is the result after AMP has done all its cleaning, which would give you a pretty accurate measure for page weight. What remains is the actual content of the page. It's the cruft that should be penalized, not the actual content.
Exactly what my sibling comment said, it's the publisher (presumably a human) who does the cleaning. It's not as easy to get a bot to clean things up and then measure weight, and the various "Readability" views aren't always correct (they're using heuristics).
Sounds like a publisher-assisted "readability view" would solve both problems, though. It would allow the user to view a "lighter" version of the page and search engines could just measure how large the "non-light" version is and penalize accordingly. I'm afraid that would incentivize the publisher to put ads and other crap in the "light" view, though.
Think you may be looking at this only through a developer lens. Bet if you showed anyone under 15 an internet without pictures and video they'd consider it broken.
What does the connection count bring anything? All that matter would be the total number of bytes transferred.
I don't think that would be a good metric for relevance though and in most case, the total size isn't an issue. Which is why AMP is good, low file size when it's needed, full size when it's not.
> I have personally saved at least one decent laptop from landfill by installing uBlock Origin on it, and making the web usable again.
For me, I'd given up on trying to browse the web on my smartphone until Firefox Focus came along. I realize Firefox for Android now allows extensions, but I still used it as a typical browser. I signed into my accounts, I had expectations for a personalized experience, etc. With Focus, it's just a quick visit to a site and then it disappears. I can find the information I want, quickly, yet again.
That's what google would do if they wanted to help the web, and not just faking they do. They used to, now they are just playing pretend for PR reasons.
It won't help you to find what you are looking for but it incentivizes the websites to reduce the weight of their pages and that is ostensibly what AMP tries to achieve.
> I'd prefer a more generic solution too: get rid of AMP
User here. I like AMP. At the end of the day, I want to read an article. Most of the time, Reader view works. But not always. AMP reliably and quickly renders legible web pages. This wouldn't be an issue if 90% of newspaper websites didn't look like they were designed by turnips.
Yes, I get why Google positioned it the exact way they did. It's very clever. But clever doesn't make it right.
If Google really wanted to improve the quality of the web they had excellent tools to achieve that: the weighing of the various elements that go into the ranking algo.
But instead they chose to do an end-run around all standards processes and to attempt to capture mobile content (which is an extremely valuable slice of all web traffic) at the expense of competition and the openness of the web.
And so you are now a very willing pawn in the endgame for the domination of the world wide web, which will eventually result in Google being the sole provider of your content by virtue of the web being consumed more and more through mobile devices.
If you're not concerned I totally understand, but maybe you should be.
> If Google really wanted to improve the quality of the web they had excellent tools to achieve that: the weighing of the various elements that go into the ranking algo
Doesn't Google already do this [1]? There are unintended consequences to increasing speed's weight in search rankings. Principally, it disadvantages smaller players. (Also, the New York Times would consistently rank under Buzzfeed.)
> you are now a very willing pawn in the endgame for the domination of the world wide web
Most people get news from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter [2]. The minority of us sharing links to newspaper articles probably also have direct relationships with publishers. For example, I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Bloomberg and other papers directly on their sites because I subscribe to their newsletters.
> maybe you should be [concerned]
Maybe, but I don't think so. The things I read about in the newspapers AMP gives me faster access to yield better (i.e. more serious and more actionable upon) avenues for my attention. In every context where AMP is a worry journalism's decline seems more important.
> Principally, it disadvantages smaller players with smaller IT budgets. The New York Times would consistently consistently under Buzzfeed. A Pyrrhic victory.
Well, assuming equal relevance yes. But the NYT is not exactly a small player and could easily up their game in the page speed department. Besides that you could slowly ramp up the weighing to give parties the time to adjust.
> Most people get news from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter [2].
And this is what worries Google. Their long term adversary is Facebook (not Twitter, at least, not nearly so much).
> The minority of us sharing links to newspaper articles probably have direct relationships with publishers.
Not necessarily. I use a variety of aggregators.
> For example, I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Bloomberg and other papers directly on their sites because I subscribe to their daily newsletters.
Ok.
> The things I read about in the newspapers AMP gives me faster access to hand me better (i.e. more serious and more actionable upon) uses for my attention.
Yes, it's a very seductive proposition, and one that given Google's power in the marketplace they just might get away with. See also: Microsoft bundling their browser and tying it in at every level possible in to the OS and other abuses of monopoly power.
> In every case where AMP is a worry, journalism's general decline is more important.
But that's the same kind of argument that people use when India has news about their space program: Why don't they fix hunger first. It's possible to both worry about journalisms decline and monopoly power abuse on the web, especially when it concerns the distribution of news.
> But the NYT is not exactly a small player and could easily up their game in the page speed department. Besides that you could slowly ramp up the weighing to give parties the time to adjust
When I'm looking for news, I want the highest-quality source first. AMP gives everyone the option of going fast now while kinks are worked out back home.
(I should mention that my default search engine is Duck Duck Go. I usually !news (Google News), though, because I like Google's news results better.)
> it's a very seductive proposition, and one that given Google's power in the marketplace they just might get away with
They might. But a lot of things might happen. AMP makes good journalism more accessible. If Google abuses that privilege down the road, it's not like they're legally unassailable.
> It's possible to both worry about journalisms decline and monopoly power abuse on the web, especially when it concerns the distribution of news
Lecturing newspapers about why they should have had speedier websites went nowhere. Seeing that the same content produced more views through AMP got the message across.
I don't think the analogy to India's space program is accurate. Technological development lifts standards of living. There's a solid argument for doing both because each helps the other. Killing AMP and forcing to choose users between crappy websites and efficient walled gardens is counterproductive.
> When I'm looking for news, I want the highest-quality source first.
Well, no, you want the highest quality source first that loads fast. Otherwise you wouldn't care about AMP in the first place!
> AMP gives everyone the option of going fast now while kinks are worked out back home.
So, do you expect that Google will ever give up their stranglehold on the sites that use AMP once they are in?
In my experience such measures tend to become permanent fixtures with their own hooks embedded in the various fabrics making removing them hard to impossible once they have achieve critical mass. We may have already passed that point, in which case you can safely ignore me.
> They might. But a lot of things might happen. If AMP makes good journalism more accessible I'm all for it.
That's your privilege. I have yet to have a day where I could not read more news than I had time for so I'm not familiar with good journalism not being accessible but I concede that this may be your situation.
> If Google abuses that privilege down the road, it's not like they're legally unassailable.
Who will take that up? You? The EU? The publishers?
My guess is that once entrenched it will be impossible to get rid of, a parasitic element in the pipe between content producer and consumer.
> Lecturing newspapers about why they should have speedier websites went nowhere.
True.
> Seeing that the same content produces more views through AMP, however, seems to have gotten the message across.
Well no, I still don't see news websites getting any faster. But they're already ridiculously fast, consider that 30 years ago you had to wait a full day to read the news and now you can read it in 10 seconds. It's great if that can be cut down to 0.01 second and I'm all for doing that and incentivizing those companies to do this but in the end it is their web property and the market should be allowed to sort this out rather than that a search engine monopolist that is already the gateway to almost all pages read on the web becomes the gatekeeper to our news.
> In the meantime, Google's cash flows get to subsidize this IT expenditure for the news industry while consumers get faster news sooner.
No, Google's cash flow will not subsidize this because they now have the eyeballs. Sooner or later there will be a push for monetization.
> Killing AMP and forcing to choose users between crappy websites and efficient walled gardens, however, is counterproductive.
> Well, no, you want the highest quality source first that loads fast
AMP isn't forcing me to read fast newspaper A over slow newspaper B. It's letting me read slow newspaper B fast. I've never clicked on an AMP link for a source I didn't know.
> In my experience such measures tend to become permanent fixtures...Who will take that up? You? The EU?
You made an analogy to Microsoft bundling browsers earlier.
> I still don't see news websites getting any faster
They are [1].
> [websites are] already ridiculously fast
That's your preference. Mine is for them to be faster.
> Google's cash flow will not subsidize this because they now have the eyeballs. Sooner or later there will be a push for monetization
AMP is open source. If we'd gone the penalise-slow-pages route, every newspaper would have had to "roll their own" AMP in house. Even if Google throws a tax on later, readers got fast pages sooner and publishers got free code.
> There are other choices besides [crappy websites and efficient walled gardens]
> There are unintended consequences to increasing speed's weight in search rankings. Principally, it disadvantages smaller players.
It's that the case with SEO already? The rules are pretty opaque. If e.g. page weight or connections made was used as a metric, it could be the other way around. Small players don't usually have hugely bloated sites, and don't load hundreds of javascript tracking shit - that's what the big players do.
There's a problem with a lot of HN discussion where people who are very tech savvy tend to have a lot of ideas for how things "should" be. But it's an echo chamber and the average user probably won't care about the nuances in development philosophy. This debate reminds of all the shouting people used to do over Spotify ruining ownership of music. There was a lot of talk about ownership philosophy, DRM and the future of digital rights and "openness" but in the end, it didn't matter because the average user didn't care: convenience won out over whatever perceived philosophical downsides where voiced. Devs can moan about the philosophy behind AMP all day long but the reality is the end experience for the user is an article that loads instantly, looks clean and doesn't bombard with pop-overs. They don't care what tech makes the magic happen, just that it happened. And Google is in a unique position to actually make the web more enjoyable to use and this is the method they chose. Is it right? Maybe...Personally I don't think so, but it does work as advertised. I've heard a lot of people complain about the problems AMP is designed to handle, but as of yet I haven't heard any good alternative solutions. Sorry, but your free-range, open-source, made-with-love ad blocking extension won't be the end all you're hoping...Google is actually in a position to fix the problem and why not let them benefit while at it?
> They don't care what tech makes the magic happen, just that it happened.
True. But I do care what tech makes the magic happen and the consolidation of the web into a very small number of silos is a dangerous development for many reasons and AMP is one plank in that consolidation game.
> Google is actually in a position to fix the problem and why not let them benefit while at it?
Because their stated reasons for AMP do not align with the implementation details, AMP grabs way too much control for a simple improvement in speed.
And to give credit where it's due, I'm glad you do. While we disagree on this point, I have a great deal of respect for your comments and found our discussion enjoyable.
> This debate reminds of all the shouting people used to do over Spotify ruining ownership of music. There was a lot of talk about ownership philosophy, DRM and the future of digital rights and "openness" but in the end, it didn't matter because the average user didn't care: convenience won out over whatever perceived philosophical downsides where voiced.
Your analogy may be reasonably apt, but if so, it shouldn't make anyone who makes their living thinking about systems sanguine.
It does turn out many consumers will trade ownership for convenience. Particularly if convenience comes at a fraction of a cost. Meanwhile, there are side effects: the people actually creating the product (recorded music) get paid a vanishing fraction of what they used to. That changes the economics of actually producing recorded music, shifting the ability to do it to people who can get their money elsewhere. Some people like to try and obfuscate that reality with talk of "new business models" and "innovation," but it all boils down to the assertion that people who make recorded music should have to do another job in order to provide cloud record collections like Spotify to a consumer for the cheapest price possible.
The consumer, as you've pointed out, doesn't want to think about this. Whether they think about it or not, it will shape what kind of music gets produced and by who, so perhaps they should think about it, even if the incentives are more long term and non-obvious.
Buuut even assuming they don't care to do that... it doesn't mean that people who do care to think about how that affects the industry don't have every right to "moan about the philosophy."
Same goes for AMP. Solutions like AMP will absolutely have second order effects. Many users don't care to think about them. Doesn't mean they won't be subject to those effects, that those effects are just about philosophy, and it surely doesn't mean that people who are interested in them have any obligation to stay quiet.
And of all the things to actually have this really be something people waste time on. Working out the economics of production and distribution of music in a time when making copies is just short of free is at least actually a tricky problem. The idea that making mobile pages that load fast is a tricky problem that requires a Google engineering solution is utterly ludicrous.
Once again, though, I think your counter to my analogy of Spotify just reiterates the echo chamber effect of the discussions here that like to debate the philosophies without seeing the bigger picture. Yeah, artists may get paid less now, but Spotify and its ilk pretty much removed piracy from the vocabulary of regular consumers. Back in 2004, music piracy was just something you did...Limewire was an essential app almost. Now, piracy is pretty much relegated to the vocal few that just flat out refuse to pay for things on some skewed principle and that's all thanks to streaming services. What's the alternative? $0.99 songs didn't cut it....should they have been priced down to $0.01? Even then, the amount of consumption would have made the cost unwieldy for many. What people "should" think about is irrelevant. Consumers should also think about using a password manager with 2FA support that stores its database locally. They should think about hosting their own email on a domain they control with SSL support and PGP built in. They should think about switching to using apps like Signal with end to end encryption built in by default. They should think about only driving cars built in the 90s before black boxes were mandatory and OBDII ports with digital interfaces were standard. They should think about a lot of things....but once again, not everybody is going to become a "geek" and jump through hoops just so they can get online, listen to must, check their bank, message friends and drive a car to the store. I completely agree that AMP and the like will have consequences if widespread adoption is seen and I don't like the idea of Apple, Google and Facebook basically controlling what articles get the most eyeballs simply because their platforms are being utilized, but in the end, what the consumer adopts is what developers will be forced to develop for. My problem is that a lot of developer-type solutions exist in the Silicon Valley echo chamber and will never see adoption because they don't take into account the big picture....technology is littered with the corpses of great ideas that consumers just didn't "get." It's true that Google doesn't have to be the one to decide how the architecture of the web works, but I think you're fighting a losing battle....it's much easier for Google to simply say "this is how it's going to be" than for a startup to say "we made this great new product and you should adopt it." Fundamentally, I don't think we disagree, but I'm playing my own devil's advocate here because I'd rather see some discussion on moving forward positively than just people yelling at a wall about how much they think Google's approach sucks which will change nothing...Google will do what they want to do and they're big enough to where if they lose a few million hardcore advocates in the process it's no skin off their nose.
> I think your counter to my analogy of Spotify just reiterates the echo chamber effect of the discussions here that like to debate the philosophies without seeing the bigger picture.
This isn't about "philosophy." This is about systems and consequences. The consequences are real to the user whether they're aware of the chain that produced them or not.
> Yeah, artists may get paid less now, but Spotify and its ilk pretty much removed piracy from the vocabulary of regular consumers. Back in 2004, music piracy was just something you did
2004 is a poor point of comparison if what you want is to get the big picture or even just answer the narrow question of whether the choice really is between cut-rate cloud record collection services like Spotify or free-for-all piracy. 2003 is when the iTunes Music Store launches and 2004/2005 is when you really start to see the rise of digital music retail. Between then and the early 2010s you see those services become widely accepted (even embraced by non-technical people) as an alternative to piracy, and you see revenue from those retail services rise just fine without streaming. In fact, I've seen some reports that suggest that by 2012/2013 the profits from digital retail was on its way to the profits from physical formats.
So the choice wasn't necessarily between fiddly inconvenient piracy and butter smooth streaming experience.
And the battle doesn't even necessarily play out on the field of consumer choice, really. I mean, in a perfect world I might well expect enough consumers to recognize how they vote with the wallet will shape the world, that when we value McDonalds the economy produces McJobs, that when your airfare dollars are ultimately decided by the lowest price you'll get a shitty airline experience.... but yeah, people don't. That's actually why it's more important for people who can see the consequences to discuss them, publicly, loudly, maybe even forcefully enough that product owners who can't see past their A/B testing (and may not even have arrived at the points where they understand the limits of that along with the value) might pay attention.
> My problem is that a lot of developer-type solutions exist in the Silicon Valley echo chamber and will never see adoption because they don't take into account the big picture....
We're concerned precisely because we see the big picture. Understanding that Google has the power to shape the landscape regardless of how that effects the value of the landscape as a whole doesn't mitigate the responsibility to talk about it, or imply that there's a missing larger picture.
> Google will do what they want to do and they're big enough to where if they lose a few million hardcore advocates in the process it's no skin off their nose.
If you're right, and we've reached the point where Google essentially no longer has management and engineering talent that cares to be a good steward of the web or no longer has the incentives to understand how AMP isn't, then that's a much heavier indictment of Google than most of AMP's opponents have leveled so far.
If we take two steps forward and one step back, it's not without merit to think about the step taken backwards and see if that loss was necessary or incidental to the steps forward. If it incidental, to see if it could/should be recovered.
And that's even if you can get everyone to agree that weighing the different aspects of a change says it's an overall benefit.
One solution punishes people, the other one rewards people and provides a nice framework where every improvement benefits everyone using it. For example, at I/O, they announced that new changes to AMP was able to speed up rendering of all AMP based by 200%, and that's without any work being done by any of the people using it.
Google is already using the ranking system to promote certain websites over others, this would be just one more factor (and presumably it already is a factor of sorts, but with a different weight).
Even if AMP pages would render 1000 times as fast it wouldn't matter, it would still be an abuse of power. The relationship between a reader and the source of their content should not be mediated by Google. What point is there in HTTPS everywhere campaigns and such if Google MITMs every news article you read? What point is there for a content provider to even have a website if Google will end up serving the content?
This is simply bad, the only upside is the speed gain and that is one that could be sorted out by the market with a gentle nudge from Google rather than by some kind of monopolistic end-game on their part.
To make matters worse, at least for some people, you can't tell which search result leads to to an AMP page, and which doesn't -- they have removed the little AMP logo.
Because it changes the relationship in a very important way. It makes Google the point of contact and the supplier of the page a mere 'information provider' rather than that Google is a source of traffic and the website a property with traffic of its own.
The main reason Google caches the pages (when a user comes from Google search) is so that the page can be preloaded by the browser before the user even clicks. This preloading is part of the reason that the experience is so fast.
If Google preloaded the page from a non-google server, there would be a few problems. The most important one is that it would violate the user's privacy. That server would have in it's logs a request from a user that didn't click on the article, and could intuit information about the user's searching behavior from that request.
Less importantly, without the page being served from Google's cache, there is no way to guarantee it's actually a valid AMP page. The only thing Google knows is that it was valid AMP the last time it was crawled, which could be days ago.
> If Google preloaded the page from a non-google server, there would be a few problems. The most important one is that it would violate the user's privacy.
That's one problem.
> without the page being served from Google's cache, there is no way to guarantee it's actually a valid AMP page
Yes there is. You can validate pages as AMP on any CDN. You just can't have any benefit unless they're hosted on Google CDN.
The biggest unsaid reason is they now own all the data. The AMP website becomes just another page on google.com - giving them direct access to know who you are and what you're reading with 1st party data rights.
Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested.
TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin as the search page.
We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits. Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate those trade offs. More coming soon, including lots of improvements to Safari. My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affect AMP (but also the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech).
Is someone working on allowing users to opt out of AMP when viewing search results? For users whose internet connections are fast and who cannot tolerate the browser UX being broken (can't copy URL out of address bar, back button doesn't always work properly, web pages often don't have comments, the list goes on and on seemingly forever).
Also, is someone working on a successor to AMP that doesn't break or try to replace the browser's own UI? Maybe something done at a lower level, maybe the HTTPS level? E.g., I could imagine something where the browser is informed that www.google.com is loading/proxying a web page on the user's behalf, and through some kind of verification system, it determines the website has given www.google.com permission to do so, and the browser UI updates itself to show the right address in the URL, etc. Maybe there's a better way to do all that, just one idea off the top of my head that seems infinitely better than AMP from a UX perspective.
Though it'd also be nice if you could get websites to make their actual main sites faster for everyone, maybe using a method like jacquesm suggested. That coupled with the low level proxying might be a nice alternative to what we have now.
> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are reallty interested.
This is not about technology. And whatever goal the AMP project states it has could have been achieved - and better - in other ways, such as the suggestion elsewhere in this thread to simply penalize page weight. If people wanted a consistent user interface across all websites they would have stuck with Videotext.
> TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech.
Yes, so was the search engine that put each result page in an iframe. Only difference was they didn't have a monopoly on search. And it does not make it right.
> Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin as the search page.
Minor technical details, not relevant. If you feel the AMP discussion is going to be swayed by technical bits you're simply out of touch.
> We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance benefits.
Who made you the deciders of what the UX of the web should look like? Stick to generating the best search results rather than trying to co-opt the entire web one little bit at the time and leave the UX to the browsers, it would seem you have enough input there already.
> Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate those trade offs.
The only trade-off that will satisfy me is AMP dying off because websites will stop to support it. But as long as Google is strong-arming content providers to use AMP that won't happen. It is no longer fair play as far as Google is concerned. If it ever was.
> My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affects AMP (but also the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech).
Consider doing something more useful with your talents. For instance, fix the long standing issue with the SERPs that makes it impossible to cut-and-paste URLs pointing to PDFs.
I also often find that discussion of motives is murky territory but:
* The post it's replying to admitted motives behind those critical of AMP to the discussion.
* The idea that page weight is a problem best solved by a solution like AMP is hostile enough to the principles the web is based on that it's hard to bar either motive or outright thoughtlessness from the discussion. Defenses on either front are also admissible.
I find it a bit strange to be called out for being 'overly agressive and hyperbolic' when that is in fact exactly how I feel about AMP in the first place, it is an overly agressive move by an extremely large company and my post is just one individual opinion which is - pre-emptively at that - already going to be ignored.
As for the job insult: there are plenty of UI/UX issues that Google could fix tomorrow if they wanted but instead they chose to work on this abomination and on top of that caused a bunch of work for companies well outside the Google ecosystem just to make things work that weren't broken before. That's a very inefficient way to allocate one's resources even at the scale of Google.
Finally, DanG has written a lot about the 'principle of charity', it appears to me that you have done everything that you could in order to take the very least charitable view of my comment and then you attack me on that interpretation.
I care about the web, in a way that I don't care about much else (HN maybe), and any and all attempts to subvert it should - in my opinion, which you are free to ignore - be fought tooth and nail lest we lose what came at a pretty great price. If you're comfortable with walled gardens and with large corporations gobbling up more and more of the open web to put it behind their store fronts then that too is fine with me. But you're not going to shut me up on this subject, nor am I going to moderate my language because you feel I should. Take the tone as a measure of my feelings on the subject.
The post is critical and frank but well within the bounds of civil discourse. Pleasant and understanding is not always the appropriate tone (though it's a good default). Sometimes people or companies do harmful things. To respond with patience and respect is to normalize them.
If that sentence had been followed by something sarcastic, derogatory, or harmful, then I'd agree. However, since it's followed by "here's an actual problem I'm having that Google could fix", I choose to believe that jacquesm is honestly saying "you've got a lot of bright people there, but AMP is the wrong project to have them spend time on".
> Who made you the deciders of what the UX of the web should look like?
It's not like they're forcing you to click on the AMP results. When Chrome started experimenting with SPDY, one could have asked them "who made you the deciders of what the protocol for HTTP transfer should be?". Yet from the lessons learned from SPDY was born HTTP/2.
That's not true. If I search <<trump on afghanistan>> I get an AMP result, a non-AMP result, the AMP carousel, another non-AMP result, another carousel, another non-AMP result...
If I were only interested in results from Reuters (the top result in the previous search, which was AMP), <<trump on afghanistan reuters>> returns 3 "condensed" AMP results and a non-AMP result above the fold, followed by 8 non-AMP results.
I just wanted to say that I appreciate your talking the time to argue with cramforce on these points. (I just realized how ironic that username is for the TL of AMP, which is being crammed/forced onto users. Good thing that "most users love the experience".)
I don't think you're going to get far though as you're obviously just "opinionated" and probably not "really interested" in the "technical discussion".
As long as "We know that most users love the experience" why deign to discuss it with the ones that don't?
I'm not certain about this, but my thinking at the moment is that as soon as you need to ask a browser vendor to change their code to accomodate your design decisions, it looks a lot less like the "open" web, and a lot more like something else.
I'm really curious to see where using AMP as a proxy speeds up the page, versus applying similar optimizations on origin server?
If it's a cached page (served from any normal CDN), and crafted with similar optimizations [1] wouldn't it be just as fast, without needing to do the URL redirection?
Even if it were difficult to convince developers to implement the changes, couldn't many of the optimizations could be rolled into a module like PageSpeed [2]?
Our latest numbers show that the average speed improvement of the AMP cache is roughly 75%. I'm a bit shocked by that myself. But that is where it stands.
Getting similar performance out of on-origin serving is a priority for us, but we aren't there yet. One challenge is to give it the same scale as the AMP cache.
Could you at least make it possible for websites to opt out of the AMP cache? Last time I checked, publishing an AMP page grants Google (and everyone else) an implicit license to incorporate your content on their own web properties. The AMP FAQ say: "Should you desire not to have your document cached, one option is to remove the amp attribute from the HTML tag. This makes the document technically invalid AMP, while not impacting the functionality of the document." But from what I understand, this will also impact the presentation and ranking in search results.
> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested.
Criticism of AMP certainly includes technical aspects, but most objections I encounter are ethical rather than technical.
Did Google explicitly consider ethical considerations when creating and launching AMP? If so, what did this process look like, and where could we find out more?
If not, isn't it time we expected ethical review to be part of significant changes in web infrastructure, the same way we would with significant changes in physical infrastructure?
Funny how literaly tens of behavioural trackers on sites that follow you everywhere, abuse holes in browser sandboxes to steal private data and try to install malware did not bring quarter of vitrol here on HN. More, bunch of people defended that as "we need to make profit".
Now that someone got rid of that it's suddenly an "ethical issue"?!
We have somewhat different expectations of Google than malware sites, because we expect it to act as a good net citizen, and a thoughtful custodian of its enormous power to shape the future of our culture.
The risk critics are concerned about here is a future where the internet no longer "belongs" to the people on it anymore, and despite the malicious nature of the abuses you named, they hardly represented that class of threat.
I've heard so much negative feedback about AMP that I'm not sure I have the full story. What link(s) would you recommend someone review if they wanted to build their own informed decision on the merits of this technology?
Today is the first time I've heard of AMP, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. I visited each of your links and followed some links on those pages, and I still have no idea what AMP is. All I see is a promise that pages will load faster. It also seems that if my boss drinks the koolaid and says "We need AMP!" it's going to cost me money in developer time, because the technology is inscrutable to my unskilled content providers. What benefits does it provide that disciplined web design doesn't? Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
AMP is mostly a series of guidelines. https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ If your site follows the guidelines, it will be fast. If you also voluntarily add a bit of JS to your page, Google (and other sites, but mostly Google) will cache your article and deliver it from their own CDN instead of loading it from your site. They won't interfere with your ads if you have them set up right. The trouble is that the URL is now a Google URL and Google puts links to more Google pages at the top of the interface instead of other links to your articles.
So, instead of actually using AMP, you could just follow the AMP guidelines and get most of the speed benefits with almost no downsides. But Google started prioritizing AMP pages in search results, so now there's a downside either way.
You can beat AMP's performance with hand-tuned optimizations. Its goal is to uplift performance across a significant percentage of web content (instead of just that developed by the few experts).
Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? No, AMP is not a ranking factor.
We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
Advertising is to AMP like Advertising is to the Web. E-commerce is a big use case where advertising is uncommon.
I understand that AMP is not a ranking factor (except for its inherent speed, perhaps). However, is there not a carousal at the top of SERPs for pages in your AMP Cache?
So while not an organic ranking factor, it would still affect SEO. Is that a fair comment? Or am I missing another perspective?
Not only that but site speed is a ranking factor. This answer definitely skirts around the reality that both we and he know since it has come up many times in the past.
As far as I see it, Google sees this as valuable to their interests, and have made clear what the talking points are and what should and should not be responded to. That's the only reason I can think of for this counter argument to be continually ignored by him.
When will I be able to get into the AMP carousel without having to import the AMP script from Google’s servers?
I’d prefer hosting all JS locally. (Or at least within of EU jurisdiction, as Privacy Shield is likely going to fall in the courts, too, as Safe Harbor did before, and I don't want to end up liable for that (and I don't want to sell out my users to some foreign tracking company))
I'm in the same boat. To me as a user, AMP has worked well. Loads content quickly, with from what I've experienced, very little drawbacks.
So I'm not sure whether AMP is just something controversial as a lot of things from Google tend to be it seems, or if there is some real technical merit as to why it's so bad apparently.
You can do the rendering, even within an iframe, on iOS (where iframes have an amazing quirk of resizing automatically) without messing with scrolling (both vertical velocity and horizontal swipes) and breaking the browser's on-page search (which is extremely annoying); in fact, it is so easy to pull this stuff off on iOS (again: in no small part due to the epic iframe quirk) that it kind of comes off like you just don't care.
In my experience it's getting better every few months. A year ago compared to now feels like it's a different search engine and I find new stuff every day, for example, vim cheat sheet
I tried this recently because ideologically I agree. But the small issues build up and make me less productive.
For example, if you use a U2F key, you need an extension for that to work - and that extension doesn't work with FF 57. I honestly don't remember the last time something broke with Chrome.
Or smaller things, like the fact that I can't use the keyboard to manage bookmarks (in FF on macOS, backspace doesn't delete bookmarks).
But the worst is in FF, Ctrl+Shift+N isn't new incognito window, it's restore the previous window. Years of muscle memory don't go away overnight.
Chances are that extension is not yet ported to the WebExtensions API. It should probably be ported eventually, as precisely one of the benefits of WebExtensions is that it makes way more easy to port a Chrome extension to a Firefox one and viceversa.
Regarding the shortcuts, I feel you. There's an extension for that as well (Menu Wizard) but it has also not been ported.
I guess it's too soon yet.
I'm trailing Brave out at the moment and like it but plugins are important to me.
Firefox is an interesting choice but the Chrome plugin ecosystem seems much more complete for me than Firefox has today.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the space. I was a Mozilla user, then Firefox and now Chrome user. I have no issue going to better platforms.
Hmm I wonder if it's possible to create a kind of independent benchmark for search engine results (I guess possibly doomed to failure due to its inherent subjective nature).
I've been trying to use DDG more, unfortunately I'm not so impressed. Quite often end up researching for Google.
I find it really strange that people think that. AMP's competitors are Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles. They've done this in the spirit of the open Web - but they get some benefit too. That's why they build most of their services.
We had that solution it was called 'the web'.
I'd prefer a more generic solution too: get rid of AMP.
It really isn't about what 'works for you' it is about what is good for Google versus what is good for the web.