Live data from Hacker News

Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

developers.googleblog.com

11–20 of 247 posts

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#11
"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]"

Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#12

There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user. Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time. As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

It also sucks if you want to interact with the page, since, inanely, you can't click through to the real page.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#13
post #11

"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]" Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and it…

"Instead of helping sites to solve the problem, we'll take care of it for them! And no need to worry about vendor lock-in, we're 'not evil', remember?"

I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers and complexity is the opposite approach that they should be taking.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#15
post #4

"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color samples if they are higher than necessary." Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image. These things should be opt-in.

They are. You don't have to publish an AMP version.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#16
post #11

"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]" Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and it…

"Instead of helping sites to solve the problem, we'll take care of it for them! And no need to worry about vendor lock-in, we're 'not evil', remember?" I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers and complexity is the opposite appro…

I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#17

There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user. Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time. As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

Sounds like Cloudflare is working on it [1].

"In the spirit of open source, we're working to help develop updates to the project to address some of publishers' and end users' concerns. Specifically, here are some features we're developing to address concerns that have been expressed about AMP: ... A way for end users who would prefer not to be redirected to the AMP version of content to opt out"

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#19

I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.

I'm real close to doing the same. I can't believe they shipped something with such a terrible user experience on so many high profile devices.

Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

#20

I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations and solutions, without a large affect on the users. I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.

AMP is open - https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml
Post reply on HN