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Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

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Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#71

Post by icebraining »

velcro wrote: post #47

AMP is of course mostly meant for articles - but we wanted to see how it did for complex(er) layouts. Had a weekend hackathon to recode our main one-pager for performance and SEO recently + we also did an AMP version of the page at http://pag.es The AMP version of the site is (as expected) not as performant as our custom optimised one. AMP version will load 1.2MB+ of data with 28+ requests, while ours makes due with…

Comparing cold loading doesn't seem appropriate - one of the points of AMP is requiring you to hotlink to their specific resources, so as to benefit fully from cache, as more website get AMP'ed.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#72

Post by beaugunderson »

acdha wrote: post #68
snappy173 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I get AMP pages via the Facebook app quite often

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#73

Post by velcro »

icebraining wrote: post #71
velcro wrote: post #47

AMP is of course mostly meant for articles - but we wanted to see how it did for complex(er) layouts. Had a weekend hackathon to recode our main one-pager for performance and SEO recently + we also did an AMP version of the page at http://pag.es The AMP version of the site is (as expected) not as performant as our custom optimised one. AMP version will load 1.2MB+ of data with 28+ requests, while ours makes due with…

Comparing cold loading doesn't seem appropriate - one of the points of AMP is requiring you to hotlink to their specific resources, so as to benefit fully from cache, as more website get AMP'ed.

Sure it does - even if you totally ignore the fact that the same AMP page is loading quite a bit of JS, that its almost double the size and double the number of requests - you're assuming that all requests are cached and thats not correct.

For the Youtube AMP component alone some of those requests are "no-cache" cookie/ads/other types + if nothing else, its also loading the video cover image i.e. effectively starting the video iframe in the background.

Which is as mentioned not ideal since the video is in a hidden inline popup thats used only by 40% of the visitors. Our main page loads and executes all of this on click/user-interaction first so ideally I'd like to be able to set how this behaves in an AMP component too. If that loads from cache afterwards - even better. But it shouldn't upfront and I can't influence it easily.

BTW fun fact - all popups/galleries/sliders/menus/animations on the page are done without JavaScript - none whatsoever (excluding pre-loading large images). They use clever new CSS techniques instead. Just for fun - we tried to go completely JS-free, but Youtube/iframe was the only problem because it was preloading everything on start (and we tried various hacks from various nested display:none; stuff to switching iframes for objects, etc.). Plus/minus Google Analytics of course.

So its quite a contrast - on one hand going JS-free, but then on another loading an insane amount of JS for the AMPed version :)

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#74

Post by jasonthevillain »

EricBurnett wrote: post #43
invisible wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although in theory AMP makes sense, I think the issue is actually more broad than just mobile. On desktop, lots of people rely on an ad blocker to make sites usable again. That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions. Google has a majority share of the first impression for ads so it's hard for me to really understand how they can't just stron…

> That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions. To be honest, I see this as short-term painful, long-term desirable. Ad blockers make the incentives of the web worse - they mean that publishers get punished for bad behaviour of other sites. Whereas without, users make more direct value judgements...if your site is covered in ads and a terribl…

> I don't think that Google has the power you think it does to strong-arm other ad networks

Not strong arm per se, but just having _any_ built in enforcement of technical standards built into DFP would solve the lionshare of the problem. At the moment, publishers have to play whack-a-mole with poorly-built creatives.

IAB's LEAN standard would be a fine place to start. (To your point about not pushing people around, I agree, we should be talking about performance as an industry standard, like viewability or HTTPS.)

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#75

Post by eponeponepon »

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…

What loads faster than straightforward clean basic HTML? The answer to speed issues is dialling back on fancypants javascript, not buying into corporate giants' content vaults. IMHO, obviously.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#76

Post by jgunsch »

acdha wrote: post #68
snappy173 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Bing.

http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-t...

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#77

Post by jakasto »

edent wrote: post #34
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'm the author of the blog post) I agree with you. My site was already fairly lightweight, but I wanted to see if AMP improved things and made a better user experience. It made it slightly faster, but other than that, didn't create a big enough impact for me to notice.

According to Google PageSpeed Insights, your speed scores are 59/100 for mobile and 40/100 for desktop. The "optimize images" section says there are 1.3MB of image optimizations to do. That's just the image bloat, not the image content, and it's just one of the improvements to make. If you want to make AMP go away, make slow webpages go away.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#78

Post by throwbsidbdk »

I think everyone is missing the point of AMP. Google could have just as easily SEO punished slow sites and had the same effect as amp. If a site was slow you wouldn't see it in search results anyway. Nothing inherent in AMP makes the web any faster than an optimized site.

The whole point of AMP is so that nobody ever really leaves Google. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve, and it's pretty fucking obvious with how the AMP UI is setup. People are saying "oh it's okay they'll change the UI when they improve AMP, V2". I doubt it, the UI was built the way it is intentionally to see if they can get away with it. "making the web faster" is just their marketing to get everyone to buy in.

Look, Google made my phone and my web browser. They are my main source of email, news, videos, and content. I spend most of my day using google devices and Google software on Google sites. Now google wants to host every site in the search results for "speed". Seem like a disturbing pattern? The internet needs to push back or be owned by Google. AMP has gone too far.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#79

Post by umeshunni »

beaugunderson wrote: post #72
acdha wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get AMP pages via the Facebook app quite often

Those are Instant Articles - Facebook's version of AMP, but not AMP itself.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#80

Post by samat »

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…

I work at media company, we have a lot of traffic from both search engines and social media. We have implemented both AMP and Instant articles from day 1 they were introduced.

I love Facebook instant articles because it solves the real problem in very efficient manner - no markup on publishers side, semantics only. And it delivers really great user experience - zero loading time for all articles with a "bolt" sign in my Facebook Feed.

I don't see real value in AMP for two reasons:

1. The top banner plague from google makes my experience reading articles much worse. It consumes a large part of my phones really small screen. Is there single reason why do we need it. I doubt people engineering AMP implementation in Google use it daily.

2. You still can make AMP pages which will consume tons of bandwidth, drain my battery and make me hate web developers (see ability to include external fonts). And for developers who care for their users it's not helping much, even making it harder (see other thread in this HN page). Okay, preferching might help, but what else?

I hoped Google makes things better, instead all I see is just defensive rhetorics about open web. I don't care much about how open or free software is. User experience matters. And I see that Facebook cares about it much more than Google. So sad.

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