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Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

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Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#61

Post by BoorishBears »

cdata wrote: post #57

Disclosure: 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…

If Facebook was the search engine and could do what Google's search results do for AMP pages for their own offering, you'd probably see a lot more complaints about it.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#62

Post by [deleted] »

hannob wrote: post #30

AMP 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…

[deleted]

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#64

Post by jakasto »

hannob wrote: post #30

AMP 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…

I don't disagree with you. However, I think the best solutions almost always address root issues, so I'd much rather Google more heavily penalized slow sites. That gets to the heart of the issue without harmful side effects. AMP does neither.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#65

Post by snappy173 »

cybernytrix wrote: post #60

As 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 i…

>2.) top banner plague

the top banner is something that Google adds, and isn't, strictly speaking, part of AMP.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#66

Post by tlrobinson »

cdata wrote: post #57

Disclosure: 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 idea of a more open version of Facebook Instant Articles is great, it's the implementation that bothers me.

Instant Articles only works in the Facebook app, while Google wanted AMP to work on every mobile browser out of the box on day one.

This has its advantages and disadvantages, but I just can't get past the hijacking of the domain. Facebook Instant Articles does not do that.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#67

Post by dmoy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #16
robertelder wrote: post #14

I 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…

Thanks for writing the review, it's a summary. BTW. Without judging whether AMP is good or bad, I'll say in this comment you just highlighted the mechanism by which many a bad thing becomes commonplace. "I wish $thing wouldn't be done, but because $market_realities, I figure I should adopt the $thing for now". Even if nobody wants $thing to happen, when many people think like this, it'll get adopted anyway, and then…

I get it though. Because while I dislike many things about AMP (mentioned elsewhere in the comments here), my non technical friends and family don't seem to rely on the functionality that's getting hosed. They don't actually ever look at the URL bar for example (incidentally may explain their propensity to fall for phishing attacks).

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#68

Post by acdha »

snappy173 wrote: post #65
cybernytrix wrote: post #60

As 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 i…

>2.) top banner plague the top banner is something that Google adds, and isn't, strictly speaking, part of AMP.

Is there any use of AMP which isn't driven by Google? I've never seen it referenced except in Google search results.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#69

Post by Twirrim »

sintaxi wrote: post #12

I can't help but feel AMP is a step in the wrong direction and was quite possibly a disingenuous play from Google from the get-go. URL highjacking is harmful for the web and I can't for the life of me understand how this project could get past the initial stages without that drawback being understood.

Added bonus is the damage being done to Google's credibility. A number of the fake news sites now appear as being "google.com", due to the funky hosting approach of AMP.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#70

Post by acdha »

ec109685 wrote: post #45
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my question then becomes "why does this require AMP?". I mean, I can build a site using standard technologies that doesn't perform 20 DNS lookups or require 20MB of javascript to display. I can do it with 0B Javascript if you really want. Is AMP really about encouraging best practises rather than introducing some new revolutionary technology?

AMP allows google to prefetch and pre-render AMP content before a user clicks given it can ensure the content does not do malicious things because the AMP format is tightly controlled. The end result is that when clicking on an AMP result, it loads instantly.

Prefetching is possible using standard web technologies and that improves the security footing since it follows the normal browser origin policies.

The actual reason for AMP is that it gives Google control: the good side of that is that companies have an outside check on performance — think about how many companies exist where internal politics means that “this will hurt SEO” will be listened to but “this page is too heavy” coming from inside will be ignored — and the bad side is that anyone who adopts it is binding their technical capabilities closely to Google's decisions.

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