What the what? I thought AMP was designed specifically to be performant and light?
Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
21–30 of 247 posts
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#22"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…
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Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#23Is there a way to block AMP and load the real page instead?
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#24There 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.
Google can't offer the full amp experience where pages load instantly without controlling the domain. Otheriwse, none of the optimization they outline in the blog post would be possible since it is the proxy that performs them.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#25I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable to opt-in.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#26To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day.
You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#27There 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.
Same here. In addition, the reasoning in the article doesn't sound sincere. If Google really cared about site speed, they would already promote fast pages more in their search results. They said they would, but it seems the boost is almost negligible.
I am worried by the attempts of several huge companies (Google & Facebook, mostly) to get more of the open internet under their control.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Have they? I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely curious because I guess I don't ever see that happening. Whenever I search for something that has a bunch of results, like weather, I end up with 30s loading, JS-filled, nightmare sites that are slow, bulky and don't show the information in a clean format. Yet there are good, simple sites like http://myfreeweather.com/ that are ~8 pages into the results.
I don't pretend to know half of the metrics they use to rank a site, but IME, it doesn't seem like speed is at all relevant.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#29"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.
That's what I thought as well. If you're publishing special images and JS then don't include AMP metadata.
Some of the concerns really should be addressed though: a clickable and copyable link could be handled with a widget at the bottom of the page, for instance.
Re: Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed
#30I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot…
It's a huge benefit with long-term negative consequences. It's the same reason the HN/EFF crowd is opposed to things like T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, where video traffic from certain providers doesn't count against your bandwidth: it's unquestionably great for an individual end user wanting to access that site, but it sets up a system where certain incumbent providers have structural advantages against newcomers—i.e., it violates net neutrality. In the future, that same end user is likely to consider getting content from another site, and be dissuaded because Binge On (or AMP) doesn't apply. A provider-neutral solution wouldn't get in the way of competition and growth.
This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology.
There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.