Has anyone else struggled with getting to the original page/article in Chrome? If anything, this is my biggest gripe.
Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
51–60 of 130 posts
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#52Wow this is crazy. I remember PayPal used to freeze your account when they detect a pattern they're not familiar with, and make you send a fax of your identity and all the documents and you wouldn't be able to touch your own money for a while.
This feels like a website version of that same bullshit process.
More and more I don't like how these "open" projects are coming from some of the largest companies. It's a huge conflict of interest, and people should know more about this.
It's important to realize that: The primary goal of Google AMP and the friends is NOT to make the web better and faster.
It's to become the AT&T/Verizon/Comcast of the content distribution. Facebook (Facebook Instant) and Google (AMP) and Apple (Apple News) want to own the low stack distribution channels as well as the application level (facebook.com, google.com, iOS devices) If one of these companies manage to control that level of the stack, they can use that as their huge advantage in competing with others.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#53As a developer type, I don't like AMP for a variety of reasons. As mobile browser user...
Webmasters: you had your chance and you blew it. Your website is completely unusable on my phone. AMP exists because of your indifference and incompetence.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#54Earlier this year I spent some time moving my blog to AMP and so far I'm pretty happy with the move. It's hosted on GitHub pages and I made the decision to go full AMP (including Desktop so I never went the /amp/ subfolder route) and allowed me to convert every existing page to AMP without having to have a new set of URLs.
It's noticeably faster but there are a few hiccups I had to deal with - JS needs to be in isolated iframes and getting Disqus comments took a bit of time but in my case the performance benefit outweighs it. At the same time I could just simplified my design without going full AMP and it probably would have been just as quick. The biggest frustration is that if you make any CSS changes it has to rebuild every single page since the style needs to be declared inline rather than as a link to a CSS file.
For those interested: http://dangoldin.com/
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#55AMP is the result of webmasters being unable to provide any kind of reasonable site performance. Which isn't hard. Don't include content from dozens or hundreds of thirdparty hosts. Don't do crazy amounts of super slow javascript. If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don…
It's worth pointing out, though, that the source of a lot of this performance drain is ads. And Google are the main provider of ads across the internet. To me, AMP feels like a method for Google to sidestep the real issue at hand.
Are google ads that slow? When I look at the dozens of requests issued by slow sites, I don't see google domains. I see every other fucking tracker, suggester, sharer, and optimizer, but not google.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#56As a developer type, I don't like AMP for a variety of reasons. As mobile browser user... Webmasters: you had your chance and you blew it. Your website is completely unusable on my phone. AMP exists because of your indifference and incompetence.
I feel exactly the opposite as a browser user.
AMP breaks the back button and makes it so I can't swipe to navigate back. It puts google.com in the address bar so that I can't easily copy the link and paste it to someone else. It puts a permanent, excessively tall border on top of every page that I can't get rid of, making the usable viewing area much much smaller. (Oh and that X button that looks like it would close it? That takes you back to the search results. Figure that one out.) It breaks nearly every convention my device has for webpages and is totally nonstandard.
I really really wish google gave a way to disable AMP links in their results but they don't listen to people like me.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#57Disclosure: I work at Google. Opinions are my own.
I'm surprised when I read discussions about AMP on HN (typically carrying a negative tone regarding AMP) without anyone mentioning an obvious competing concept: Facebook Instant Articles.
Here is an excerpt from Facebook's FAQ on instant articles:
> Rather than loading an article using a web browser, which takes over 8 seconds on average, Instant Articles load using the same fast tools we use to load photos and videos in the Facebook app
Facebook has drawn a line around the open web and stamped it as slow compared to Facebook's proprietary content delivery system. If nothing else, AMP is a timely wakeup call for content publishers: if you like the open web, better start producing content that loads quickly on a phone over a 3G network. Otherwise, we will incrementally lose openness at the behest of users who will demand the superior experience of channels like Facebook Instant Articles.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#58AMP is the result of webmasters being unable to provide any kind of reasonable site performance. Which isn't hard. Don't include content from dozens or hundreds of thirdparty hosts. Don't do crazy amounts of super slow javascript. If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don…
The solution is very simple.
Google's spider uses headless chrome which runs Javascript (to index flash and Ajax content). Why can't they detect how long it takes to run your page before getting useful content?
What about just penalizing Javascript?
What about penalizing download size?
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#59I did a technical review of what I felt were the major pros/cons of implementing AMP pages: http://blog.robertelder.org/adding-support-for-amp-pages/ Edit: To save you a click, here are some of the key points: - You can't use Javascript on AMP pages, but you can put Javascript in iframes or substitute the javascript feature for an existing amp-component. - AMP pages require that Javascript is enabled. - In order for…
The AMP only js, hot linking and non-local copy is part of the cache magic that makes it work so I wouldn't expect that to change.
Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage
#60As a user, I can't stand amp -- issues are 1.) no link to original site. 2.) top banner plague 3.) weird smooth scrolling that messes with my muscle memory.
There are two workarounds to avoid amp all together: 1.) use DDG and prefix all queries with "!g" or 2.) visit encrypted.google.com that does not use amp.
Given that I tend to stay on a page for 2-10 minutes, shaving off 1sec is less than 0.8% improvement. This is not worth it given the horrible drawbacks and UX.