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

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

#91

There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet…

You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain. No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (rememb…

If browsers detected AMP pages and treated the address bar accordingly:

Cached from: nbcnews.com/some-article

Would you feel better about it?

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

#92

There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet…

You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain. No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (rememb…

You don't seem to understand the technology or the argument you made. The URL bar says google.com because google.com is serving the content you are reading. In other words, it exactly honors the "fundamental contract" you find so important.

I also dispute your qualitative opinion that nbcnews.com works "just fine". If I load their top story currently from AMP it loads in about half a second. If I visit it from nbcnews.com it renders in about seven seconds and doesn't finish loading for about 90 seconds, and then when it does I get a big popover survey/ad thing with a dismiss button that's too small to touch. The mobile experience on this site is far from fine.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on iOS 10.2 also. Searching for something like "site:reddit.com casserole" gives a couple of AMP results. Clicking them just shows google loading circle thingy indefinitely, the page never opens.

I just did this on my iPhone, and it worked instantly. In fact I've never seen an AMP page that doesn't load... My guess would be that you have a content blocker, ad blocker, anonymizing proxy, DNS server with ad-blocking, or something in your setup that's breaking it, because it's not broken natively.

I also confirm this works fine for me on Safari and iOS 10.2 (iPhone SE, not that I think it matters).

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the disagreements with AMP entirely. Google, with less effort, could have released a series of requirements for a page to be considered "AMP"ed: (examples) 0 blocking script requests, less than 500KB in total page load, page loads in under 1s, etc. Once your pages meet these requirements, they gain the AMP moniker. Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. This engineer…

> Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. I'm not a web dev, but I understand there were also requirements about deterministically sizing elements, as having things jump around the page is really disruptive to a mobile user. I thought the presentation method stuff was to help prevent presentation issues, including dark patterns. Is there a way to use static or dynamic analysis to prevent tha…

The google search spider literally loads webpages in a specialized browser to analyze them, a little instrumentation or even a brute-force comparison would let them detect bad behavior (and monitor load times).

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

#95
I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ... all regret it.

The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them.

And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.)

Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...".

AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 different JavaScript frameworks This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loa…

>> "This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all." Hasn't Facebook proven this to be incorrect. Facebook mobile app was originally just HTML5 & JavaScript. The experience was so slow, they ditched it and instead built a native iOS & Android app. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/

That seems irrelevant here -- Facebook is a web app that needs you to log in, and displays user-specific info in a very dynamic way. It's not the kind of thing that could ever be cached, whether by Amp or any other generic CDN.

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

#97
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you detail the issues you've had with AMP pages? I use Safari on iOS 10.2 daily and have never noticed an issue loading AMP pages.

They load fine (and FAST) for me, that's never been an issue. But because they have a completely different scroll weight the feel wrong. I can't easily share them, and the stupid bar at the top of the page takes up 15-20% of my screen. They're obnoxious to interact with. If they fixed just two of those issues (make the bar tiny, don't mess with scroll feel) I'd be a lot happier. As it is I find myself actively avoidi…

Anyone know why they do those two things? Why not just deliver a normal web page that scrolls normally?

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

#98
And don't forget: at least 99% of users will be completely unaware of AMP. They'll use it by default because lots of Google search results use AMP.

Google gets to make this happen because they own the users, and there's very little to be done about it.

The only countermeasure I can think of is if lots of publishers were to boycott AMP en masse. But publishers have been unable to reduce web bloat any other way, so what would their upside be?

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did this on my iPhone, and it worked instantly. In fact I've never seen an AMP page that doesn't load... My guess would be that you have a content blocker, ad blocker, anonymizing proxy, DNS server with ad-blocking, or something in your setup that's breaking it, because it's not broken natively.

I also confirm this works fine for me on Safari and iOS 10.2 (iPhone SE, not that I think it matters).

It doesn't work for me, and never has. Also on Safari and iOS 10.2.

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

#100
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They load fine (and FAST) for me, that's never been an issue. But because they have a completely different scroll weight the feel wrong. I can't easily share them, and the stupid bar at the top of the page takes up 15-20% of my screen. They're obnoxious to interact with. If they fixed just two of those issues (make the bar tiny, don't mess with scroll feel) I'd be a lot happier. As it is I find myself actively avoidi…

Anyone know why they do those two things? Why not just deliver a normal web page that scrolls normally?

Apple chooses to use accelerated scroll for iframes in mobile safari for some reason. The inner iframe is needed in AMP for security reasons since the experience on google includes third party iframes as part of the rendering of the article.

Google has fixed it so the site name header finally goes away when scrolling.

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