AMP is the perfect way to punish big publishers for their slow websites. Google can't punish them by simply lowering their rankings, people want to see those big publishers.
I decided to disable AMP on my site
241–250 of 360 posts
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. Depends what you mean by technically superior. In terms of benchmarks, AMP pages are lightning fast. Isn't that the only metric that matters?
I meant that you could achieve the same by reducing the bloat, applying the best practises etc. To be fair, Google has been encouraging people to do so through the PageSpeed suite for quite a long time... What I found unfair about AMP is Google preloading your AMP-enabled webpage. So that even if your not-AMP-enabled page is equally efficient, an AMP-enabled page would feel faster because Google preloads it in the ba…
Right, but users don't care about the reasons why it's faster. They just know it's faster. Hence they use AMP, and AMP gains traction. We can say it's unfair, but that's life.
If we want to defeat AMP, we have to beat it at its own game. That requires us to come up with an alternative that's equal or faster than AMP. And clearly we've failed as developers to push for non-bloated solutions.
It might be possible to create our own version of AMP -- to take the best ideas from AMP and integrate it into some centralized system that isn't controlled by Google. It'd be tough, but the alternative is to let AMP steamroll us. A few rebellious developers aren't going to make much difference in terms of total AMP adoption.
Even if the AMP alternative was just a standard way of stripping bloat from websites, that might get us 50% of the way toward beating AMP.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how about other CDNs like Cloudflare?
Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.
You do have the choice... The only part that forces you to use Google's cache is to get on their search carousel, but other than that, you can still use AMP and not their cache.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#244> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google. As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see…
>> If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. > As a user, this is what I want. That's what the back button is for though. For me, I consider AMP pages a kind of in-between page. I searched on Google, and Google is showing me the AMP page, and not the real website's page. This is apparent by the URL in the address bar. I expect that clicking the close button w…
That's not what I would expect a close button to do, at all. It seems like you're expecting it to actually work like a forward button?
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
So lets say AMP was not invented. Web pages have been notoriously slow on mobile for a decade. Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? where is W3 or Mozilla? Its been a decade. if there was a competituve open standard I would be against AMP but there isnt.
> Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience. And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page…
And until Google and AMP came along, there was no stick to make authors do this.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#246> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google. As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see…
> scrolling can be wonky Last time this came up someone linked to a Google employee submitting a bug report to Apple about the scrolling. Their response was "that's how it's supposed to work - the rest of the system is wrong and we will fix that". So iPhone users might not have much choice anyway soon! Kind of reminds me of how terrible mouse acceleration is on OSX, and how Apple gradually removed all the options for…
If they just made simple html the requirement instead of a bunch of extra crap they wouldn't have that problem.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. You don't need AMP to get rid of them though. We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for…
Because most of these pages are also corporate owned, and they believed that doing that stuff increased revenues.
Exactly, and Alex is probably not the only one who thinks that way:
"I initially enabled AMP on my site for one reason only – ranking well in Google search results."
This reminds me about a friend of mine, his father used to run a restaurant and he enabled "donations" to the mob to get a "better ranking" (or not to suffer worse ranking as it were).
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.
You do have the choice... The only part that forces you to use Google's cache is to get on their search carousel, but other than that, you can still use AMP and not their cache.
If your competitors are doing it, and you want to survive, you don't have a choice.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Giving you free hosting all across the world, much closer to your users, is disgusting? Unless you're hosting a webserver on your computer, your server is most likely being hosted in the cloud somewhere (aka some random computer somewhere in the world). How is it being on a Google server, instead of company X's server, suddenly disgusting?
Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.
By that logic, does AWS have huge amount of power? Why does it matter what server the content is hosted on? Aren't almost all websites hosted on a remote server? The only difference is Google gets to choose what shows up on their search, and they always had that control anyway.
Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site
#250The author has some very valid points against AMP from a technical standpoint, but for me there is a single reason that is sufficient: the Web is, and should stay, free and open . Indeed, I'm having really hard time trying to understand how people can be fine with AMP while fighting for the net neutrality and so on.
Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.
Monopoly and racketeering. Site owners, do as the Good Google says if you don't like to loose your visitors and customers.