AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it - if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!
Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
81–90 of 489 posts
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up. It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was…
> If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators…
I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites?
The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful.
Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#83In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly. However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition. * In practice there are implementation problems too, e.…
>Content should remain on the publisher's site. Publishers are free to implement their own cache and host their own content. AMP is open source and they can modify it however they like.
Publishers already host their own AMP content. Google caches that content, but anyone can go to the publisher's URL and get it directly.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and have some involvement with AMP.
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#84Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them. I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyon…
Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.
And specifically why not Bing?
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python". Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website…
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Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python". Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website…
See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560
You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them.
I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there.
That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean that when you click a search result in Google you should go to the publisher's site, not to Google's cache of the content. It may have changed since, but that's how it was implemented originally by Google: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang... "…but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Goog…
I was under the impression that the publisher could elect to use their own servers for their AMP content. Is this not possible anymore?
There's a lot of doublespeak around this.
1. You can (and must) host AMP content on servers of your own choosing.
2. Google's crawlers ingest your AMP content, validate it, and re-host it in Google's AMP Cache. Bing and other folks run similar crawlers and caches.
3. Google search results will only link to AMP content on Google's own cache.
So yes, you can host your content on your own servers. And you can give people direct URLs to that content. But Google users will only ever see links to the copy of your content that Google hosts; your servers never see that traffic.
There is no way to opt-out and still be considered a valid AMP page.
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#88I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a single article.
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea. Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't…
They said AMP outputs HTML5, not outperforms it.
Oh. I guess I just read it that way because I'm used to people saying that AMP is much faster than HTML five (and given a horribly bloated page it is).
Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
#90HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to make sites faster.
AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy.
Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.