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Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

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Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#101

Post by majewsky »

dangoldin wrote: post #54

Earlier 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 isola…

I don't know what you did there, but it takes about 8 seconds on my desktop before it displays anything. Talk about "accelerated".

Edit: I checked with the Developer Tools, but I have no idea what is going on there. Assets are fully loaded within 500 ms, and then it just sits there for another 7.5 s before rendering anything at all. (I will note that cdn.ampproject.org is blocked by default in my uMatrix.)

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#102

Post by majewsky »

invisible wrote: post #38
EricBurnett wrote: post #11

This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle. (1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue rai…

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.

Mobile ad-blocking works just fine for me (uBlock on Firefox for Android).

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#103

Post by x0x0 »

majewsky wrote: post #98
cbdfghh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Websites already can detect whether the client on the other side is Google's spider (either by checking for the well-known IP ranges, or by looking at the User-Agent). So they could supply a fast, cached version to Googlebots, and thus appear faster than they are. I can see why Google would do this AMP thing. It's much easier to detect fast websites through positive rather than negative evidence.

That's cloaking, and doing much of it will get you severe penalties.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#104

Post by madeofpalk »

lucideer wrote: post #87
madeofpalk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at and 'reviewed' alternatives, such as Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News Format? Why is passing validation an important thing for AMP? The main complaint I hear about it is the AMP CDN, where Google caches and hosts your page for you. If you're failing validation then they wouldn't do this, right? So you get the advantages of a fast page without the disadvantage of Google reposting your content…

The main advantage of validation is prioritisation in Google's search results, the AMP logo next to your search result on Google (which for most Google users has come to mean "fast"), and the extra speed-up of Google's CDN.

Herein lies the 'confusion' with AMP - its actually two completely different things:

- news distribution platform

- framework and guidelines for making fast webpages

If you want Google to distribute and prioritise your content, you'll have to play by their rules, just in the same way if you want Apple's help as well.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#105

Post by iainmerrick »

ninkendo wrote: post #56
ksherlock wrote: post #53

As 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…

I realised reading these comments that I've never actually seen an AMP page in search results.

Somebody mentioned that if you use duckduckgo and prefix your search with "!g" (to search on Google), you don't get AMP results. That's what I do, so I guess it's working for me. :)

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#106

Post by shakna »

majewsky wrote: post #99
jakasto wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Interesting. I put my own blog (link in my profile) into there, and it scored only 90/100 on mobile. Google now wants to talk me into enabling compression and caching on a website that is literally 4.98 KB large (including all assets).

I got 91/100 mobile, 90/100 desktop for a site that is 4.95kb.

Reasons?

* Apparently the HTML should be minified.

* Apparently I should use gzip, because 4.95kb is too big.

* The inline styles are below the content to prevent showing the user nothing as it paints. Google thinks the 594 bytes of styles needs to be in a separate request.

I think insights is pretty useless at analysing sites below a certain size threshold.

At these sizes, network latency is the biggest drain on loading a page... Which effectively means users don't notice loading times when they click a link.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#107

Post by cdata »

sintaxi wrote: post #97
cdata wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't google drawing it's own line around the open web with AMP? Yes, I mean, AMP isn't the solution I might build independently. But, it is built on standard, open web platform features. You can render an AMP article from any source in a manner of your choosing, using the features available in a web browser. > If google really cared that much about speed they would just punish slow sites. They have started doing t…

> But, it is built on standard, open web platform features. - url highjacking isn't standard, or open, or a feature. - forcing javascript to load from a specific domain is not standard either.

Let's not conflate the text/HTML-based syntax and the distribution channel implemented by Google. You can render an AMP document with your own implementation of the AMP custom elements. Can I do anything remotely similar with Instant Articles?

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#108

Post by throwbsidbdk »

cdata wrote: post #107
sintaxi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, it is built on standard, open web platform features. - url highjacking isn't standard, or open, or a feature. - forcing javascript to load from a specific domain is not standard either.

Let's not conflate the text/HTML-based syntax and the distribution channel implemented by Google. You can render an AMP document with your own implementation of the AMP custom elements. Can I do anything remotely similar with Instant Articles?

The problem is that for amp pages to work with Google search, which everyone uses, it needs to use Google's flavor.

Google should just stop pretending that AMP is any different than fb instant articles. Yeah it gives you more syntactical freedom and you can run some scripts in iframes, the lock in factor is the same.

Not sure why it matters that the scripts are hosted by Google, you can easily add hashes to external scripts to guarantee they haven't been altered.

Yes it's more open than fb instant articles but both act to build a fence around open web

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#109

Post by cdata »

throwbsidbdk wrote: post #108
cdata wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not conflate the text/HTML-based syntax and the distribution channel implemented by Google. You can render an AMP document with your own implementation of the AMP custom elements. Can I do anything remotely similar with Instant Articles?

The problem is that for amp pages to work with Google search, which everyone uses, it needs to use Google's flavor. Google should just stop pretending that AMP is any different than fb instant articles. Yeah it gives you more syntactical freedom and you can run some scripts in iframes, the lock in factor is the same. Not sure why it matters that the scripts are hosted by Google, you can easily add hashes to external…

That's all totally fair. But in my original comment, I tried to center my observation on how Facebook has threatened the openness of the web with a proprietary alternative. Is it even possible for Google to deliver the same features without drawing a line around something? If so, how does that hypothetical thing differ from AMP?

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#110

Post by shostack »

throwbsidbdk wrote: post #78

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…

I am concerned with how they have "nudged" sites to use AMP with the consequence being worse mobile rankings combined with them essentially getting final say around who gets to be an ad partner that is white listed.

As an example of where this is concerning...look at the importance of the GDN and other exchange inventory to Google. Now look at FB trying to grow its offsite presence with Facebook Audience Network. Hmmm...doesn't seem to be supported by AMP tags. Interesting.

It also looks like it severely hinders analytics efforts for everyone but Google due to the JS limitations.

As a business move it is fascinating to wTch this play out. However I really do worry about how much control Google is trying to exert here...it is rather unprecedented.

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